Kou's Guidelines for Organized Crime
by Wyrvel
Summary: Sawada Kou is a fast-paced fourteen-year-old girl in her second year of middle school, plagued by low blood pressure, her status as a social pariah, and an elaborate extended family drama. But that's nothing in comparison to what the man from Italy brings to her door... (fem!Tsuna, adult!Arco)
1. That Girl From Japan (Side A)

**AN:**

[Running in the 90s plays at full blast]

The full title, "綱の組織犯罪の要綱", is kind of a gag. So, Tsuna's name uses the kanji "綱吉". That's "綱" for Tsuna and "吉" for Yoshi. But there's multiple ways to read each kanji! Tsunayoshi is read with the _"kun"_ reading. And more often than not, the entire meaning of the word changes with the reading. (吉 means the same thing both ways, but the _on_ reading is 'Shichi', if you're curious.)

So, the _kun_ reading of 綱 is "tsuna", which means "rope". It is used in sentence structures implying rope. But Kou uses the on reading of this kanji, which is "Kou". Kou is a normal unisex name, and would be considered normal, if Kou used in that way wasn't a scientific textbook word, because when you use the _on_ reading, 綱 means 'class', and is used to create the words for 'mission statement', 'outline', and, as you can see above, 'guidelines'. Kou's name is a specifically Japanese and completely untranslatable concept of absurdity, veering from "unorthadox" to straight-up "what are you DOING". She COULD just use kanji that make up the totally normal, average name of 'Kou', but she didn't, because she's ridiculously particular, and I wanted a title that reflected on this concept. The actual title translation is closer to "Kou's Organized Crime Outline", or "Kou no soshiki hanzai no youkou".

Yes, that's absolutely an elaborate and unnecessary thing for an english-speaking writer who doesn't know Japanese to set up. But I like to go that extra mile. (Also, Tsunako and Tsunami are tacky names that ignore the basis of his name to begin with.)

* * *

 **EPISODE 1**

 **That Girl From Japan** **(Side A)**

* * *

The cicadas are deafening.

Maybe that's just bias. Maybe they only seem deafening because there's no breeze rustling the trees, and the summer heat is damp and stifling, and the only other sound seems to be the steady scuff of footsteps against the well-trodden dirt path.

But for Sawada Kou, it seems deafening.

Beads of sweat build up along her spine and neck, despite the fact her body temperature is always so low that she's constantly forced to resort to doing cardio to keep it up, like her heart is constantly forgetting what it means to cycle blood properly. Of course, even a rock will get hot if you leave it in the sun long enough, and she has been in the sun for a _while_.

The canopy of trees surrounding her don't do much to help. The path takes two hours, and it's uphill both ways thanks to the mountainous region. It's nothing she's not used to; she's been taking it twice a month for the past four years, ever since she was ten years old. At this point, the road is part of her.

Unfortunately, things such as _muscle memory_ developed up to 'the ability to walk on flat surfaces' and promptly gave up there for the rest of her natural development.

As she tries to descend down a particularly massive hill, the forced increase in pace is too much for her poor untrained feet to manage. She shuffles like a penguin in a helpless attempt to grind to a halt, but the velocity is too much, and she just ends up grinding the tips of her toes against the ground, losing her balance entirely. Kou yelps, hits the dirt, and bounces right off the trail and down the side of the hill.

It's not a long drop, and there's plenty of trees to stop her fall before she breaks something on the way down. It still hurts, a _lot_. She smacks her head first, then her shin collides painfully with another thin trunk. She's reeling in pain and can only bring her arms up to her face in pure instinct when she finally lands in the dirt at the bottom of the drop.

She skins her elbows and her wrist makes an unpleasant _shifting_ feeling.

Then comes the pain.

Kou bites back a scream and digs her feet into the soft, dry earth. When the initial spike dies down and she can find her breath, she slowly staggers to her feet to survey her fall. Not that bad, she considers, even as she nurses her definitely twisted wrist. She checks her bag for crushed vegetables, and sighs in relief when she finds that they're all fine. For what counts as fine, seeing as the fall had dumped them all over the forest floor.

She's used to her own clumsiness and poor coordination, so she doesn't bother taking the time to wallow in self-pity and agony. Kou diligently picks up everything she's dropped, and climbs back onto the trail. She moves slower, this time, careful not to jostle her injury. She had been hoping _something_ would liven up her dull trek, but wishes that something didn't happen to be grievous injury.

Luckily, the local mountain range has a lot of cases like this, and there's a clinic just down the path. Kou regretfully trudges towards it when she hits the fork. That's another twenty minutes to her journey, for no reason. There's sweat slicking her forehead, making her feel disgusting and droopy.

The Clinic is a small building, not really designed for a bunch of people at once, and it sits in a small clearing, like a cottage in a fairy tale. A cottage with a helicopter. The search-and-rescue teams for these mountains operate out of her hometown of Namimori, but the clinic has one on hand to get people out of the area quickly without wasting resources. Usually for people who twisted their ankle or something and don't have anyone to drive them out. Which is a situation Kou has been in at least twice. She likes riding in the helicopter.

Kou pushes through the door with her shoulder, and sighs at the blessed coolness of air conditioning. She finally takes the time to mop the sweat off her face with the front of her T-shirt and places her bag onto her chair.

"Again?"

Kou flinches and turns to sheepishly look at the receptionist leaning lazily against the desk. They've never exchanged names, but they're familiar enough with one-another at this point. "Sorry…I'm still a little clumsy."

"You shouldn't go up past here alone, with how often you hurt yourself."

"At least I give you something to do?"

The receptionist gives her a sardonic look.

Kou flashes her a weak smile. "…Is the doctor in?"

"He's with a patient." The receptionist's eyes flick down towards the floor. Kou follows her gaze, and sucks in a sharp breath when she sees the trail of blood smears and droplets, leading past the lobby into the hall beyond until it disappears into one of the three rooms available for patients.

"Animal attack?" Kou asks.

"Not exactly," the receptionist idly deflects.

"Oh," Kou says, not exactly eager to learn more, and sits down in one of the chairs lining the wall. In the following few minutes, where the only sound is the scratch of the receptionist's pen and the ticking of the too-loud clock on the wall, she can make out voices, mostly short little biting sounds of pain. Kou picks at the wristband around her injured wrist, then pulls it back to peek underneath. It's bruising unpleasantly on one side.

A door opens, and Kou peeks up to see Dr. Ishizaki coming out with a heavily bandaged patient. She sucks her teeth nervously when she sees the tell-tale flare of apple-red hair (that is inexplicably full of sticks and leaves). Her anxiety is validated when the patient's eyes skim languidly across the room to rest heavily on her, staring with an unsettling coldness. He scratches the stubble on his chin idly.

"I recognize you. You come to the Izumi's every now and then, right?"

Kou swallows thickly and nods. She lives in Namimori, but twice a month, she makes this trip to the little bedroom community of Hakuyou to see her grandma Kumiko, her great-aunt Keiko, and whoever else wants to see her at the time. It's mostly just the Izumi family, though. She's been doing it for the past four years, ever since she was ten, and in that time, she's learned to be very wary of autumn-coloured hair.

"I don't think I've ever seen you up close," he says.

She usually crawls through the bushes to get back on the main road unaccosted. "I'm not usually around long."

"Huh. Well, nice to meet you, little lady. Yamazaki Kunihiro." He outstretches a bony, long-fingered hand. Kou's eyes dart from the callouses, to the tan, to the wiry muscles of his arm, to his face.

She bows and gently gives the hand a little shake. "…Sawada Kou."

"HA! SAWADA!" He shouts suddenly, and Kou squeaks and jumps a little in her seat. "Now I remember, Izumi's little girl got swept off her feet by that big lug. He still around?"

Kou, too panicked to speak, simply shakes her head.

"Figures. It's good that you're growing up the way you ought to, though. Kumiko may have left the main family, but it's important we keep the blood strong."

Kou nods. Despite the coolness of the room, she can feel sweat prickling against her skin again.

"Anyway, I ought to be getting back. Thanks for sewing me up, doc. Now I know who to see in a pinch."

"Try not getting shot, next time," Dr. Ishizaki dryly replies.

"Haha, I can't make any promises," Yamazaki waves. Before he goes, he drags his eyes over Kou with the sharpness of a blade against stone, and says "careful. It's a dark world out there."

Kou nods again.

He leaves.

The second the door closes, she lets out a _whoosh_ of air and gasps it back in again. She hadn't realized she was holding her breath, but now her head is…well, it's not pounding, because her heart isn't especially responsive on the best of days, but she feels really dizzy.

The receptionist leans over the desk, grinning gleefully. "Main family? Are you like, some sort of _secret heiress_?"

"…My gran renounced the family. She's from a clan, that's all. He was probably just interested because of that," Kou mumbles.

Dr. Ishizaki takes pity on her. "Ignore him. He just likes making people uncomfortable. Your family business is your family business. Come on, show me what you did this time."

Kou waves her injured arm meekly. "Sprained it."

"Of course you did," Dr. Ishizaki sighs.

Kou follows him into the examination room, trying to avoid eye contact with the receptionist in the process. She's tired, hurt, and a little spooked, and she just wants to go home as soon as possible. Her wrist throbs, and she takes a steadying breath to keep from flinching when the doctor probes it.

An injury, a vague threat, and a slightly more meaningful conversation with the clinic staff. This is the most exciting her life has gotten in a while. She supposes she should enjoy it while it lasts.

There isn't anything especially interesting about Sawada Kou.

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

Kou gets back home when the sun is setting. It still hasn't hit the horizon yet, and the city is still illuminated enough that there aren't any creepy shadows, so she supposes that counts as making good time.

Her house is large, with two floors, four bedrooms, and a yard. Kou isn't sure why they need a house that big, when Kou is an only child and her father is too busy stacking up his on-site jobs to bother coming home. It's been just the two of them for two years now, and the extra bedrooms have been converted into a study and a guest room no one ever uses.

She doesn't even spend a lot of time in the house, because if she wants to see her family, she has to head all the way out to Hakuyou. Kou goes over to see her grandmother all the time, but her grandmother — and all her other family members, for that matter — refuses to come see them. Probably all that residual disgust with her father. It's a very lonely home.

When she peeks in the kitchen, the clock on the wall tells her it's only ten after seven. Just after dinner, which means she can eat something warm! This day is going better than she thought.

"I'm home!" Kou calls.

"Welcome back," her mom sings from the kitchen.

Kou quickly slips off her shoes and pads over on rapid tip-toes to the kitchen. Her mother is doing the dishes with her back turned, so Kou quickly drops her bag on the table and hugs her from behind.

"What's for dinner?"

"Well, I found a great sale on steak, so—"

"Yessssss!" Kou looks around for her meal, and zeroes in on the plate still sitting on the table. She skids across the linoleum in her haste to get to it. "Thanks for the meal!"

Her mom turns, frowning, and eyes Kou up and down before her gaze settles on her wrist. "Oh, honey, what happened this time?"

"Went down too fast on one of the hills. Landed on it all wrong. It's not anything bad," Kou says through a mouthful of mashed potatoes, eagerly cutting into her meat.

"Oh, don't do that, you're going to make it worse." Her mom takes Kou's utensils and cuts her steak into pieces that can feasibly fit in a human mouth.

Kou flushes and swallows. "Thanks."

"You need to take care of your body more. Just because it happens often doesn't give you an excuse to treat yourself so badly. What if you get permanently injured? You know, I heard one of your classmates got into an accident, and he lost a _whole arm_ _—_ "

"There's no way that really happened," Kou harrumphes, sticking a juicy chunk of steak in her mouth.

"It did! It was a car accident, and it got crushed! Oh, honey, don't sprint in the streets, I don't want that happening to you— but you should try thinking of it like you're missing an arm, for now. Just don't use it until it feels better."

Kou is too busy chewing to answer, so she raises her eyebrows and nods.

"Good! Just put your plate in the sink when you're done, okay?" Her mom skips back over to the sink again, and Kou eats against the background noise of plates clinking and tuneless humming. Her mom finishes before Kou does, and sways into the living room, where she turns the radio on and pulls out her needlework.

Kou swallows her last bite and licks the potato mush off the plates idly. She cannot for the life of her remember if she has homework left, so she supposes she can just work on her whittling for now. (She probably _does_ have homework, but she can't do assignments she doesn't remember.)

She slides out of her seat and puts the plate in the sink as instructed. On her way out of the kitchen, her mom calls out to her.

"Oh, Kou-chan! Could you come here for a second?"

"'Kay," Kou calls back. She walks backwards until she's standing in the doorway to the living room. "Yeah?"

Her mom holds up a piece of paper. Kou turns around to walk properly forward so she can see it. It's a flier, simple, nothing but words, but the font and design is good enough to make up for it. She scrunches her nose up and reads it aloud.

" _'Home Tutor Reborn'_ … _'I'll prepare your child to be the leader of the next generation'_. Kinda bombastic phrasing for a tutor."

"Your grades are always so low, though, a home tutor would be wonderful! See, at the bottom, it says he'll only be living here for a year, and the contract can be negotiated. Isn't that nice? He's got a contract!"

"I don't need a tutor," Kou sighs, dropping the paper on the table. Well, technically she does, but she doesn't need someone living in her house breathing down her neck about her complete lack of inability to manage her schoolwork. In her experience, being yelled at only makes her even more unmotivated, and there is nothing more singularly unappealing than the idea of a person whose sole purpose is to yell at her. _In her own home_.

"Of course you do! Kou-chan, it'll be fine, he'll get his own room, and I'll make sure there's no funny business!"

Kou grimaces and refrains from commenting on poor phrasing. "It's fine. I can get my grades up on my own."

"Hmm…" Her mom doesn't contradict her, but she doesn't agree either, and she's still staring at the flier. Kou sighs. She might have to actively chase the tutor out. Probably wouldn't be very hard. She's earned a sizable reputation for being intolerable at school, why not at home?

"…Oh, right. Everyone got us stuff." Kou bounces back into the kitchen and grabs her bag from the table. "Uhmmm…It's mostly Gran's veggies this time."

"Ooh, let me see, let me see!" Her mom outstretches a pair of grabby hands.

Kou walks back over and dumps the contents out onto the table. "Veggies, some of the kids made a bunch of bracelets, and Kouta tried to give me a stag beetle but I had to tell him that I couldn't bring it home."

"Ooh! Put the bracelets on, they can remind you not to use your wrist."

" _Mom_ ," Kou laments, but she does it anyway. "Uhmmm, Great-Aunt Keiko gave us a box of tea, Auntie Yuuko gave me an old dotera, Uncle Daisuke gave me these little taxidermy birds, _again_ , aaand Uncle Hiroshi got some wood for me and yarn for you, since you said you wanted to try knitting out."

"He does love giving you birds," her mom says, idly turning the little feathered figure around.

"The bases are cheap and small, and birds are all I know how to whittle, it makes sense for him," Kou shrugs. She had taken up whittling because she felt threatened by her mother's inhuman speed and generosity regarding embroidery and needlework, and felt obliged to have her own craft hobby to give to extended family members while out on her trips. So far, very fat, very round birds are all she can do with any sort of competency, since they're simple and the rough blockiness of her work kind of looks like feathers. She has made at least forty wrens by now. She thinks her Uncle Daisuke must have just assumed she really likes birds.

"What's that?" Her mom picks the edge of the bag up to reveal fabric underneath.

"Whoops." Kou pulls it out and unfolds it a bit, revealing the big quilted blanket. She pulls a face at the family emblem for the Kouyou clan decorating it. The Izumi family belongs to the Tsukioka clan. It feels like a pointed statement. "Uhm…It's from the…the _'main family'._ Uncle Naoki, I think."

"Oh my goodness! It's beautiful!" Her mom gets to her feet so she can unfold the whole thing. It's a vivid red, and padded, probably intended for winter use. The white stitches and careful shape of the emblems gives Kou the impression that it's been painstakingly hand-stitched, in the way that takes years of work. "Strange, the Kouyou family never tried to contact us before."

"One of them caught me accepting gifts last month and kinda forced me to take it. I guess they've given up on getting gran to make up with them," Kou shrugs.

"Aww, well isn't that sweet. I'll have to make something for them to say thank you!"

"Please don't," Kou whimpers. Logically, she knows this is probably a genuine effort to keep the family close, but in the past four years, her grandmother has practically indoctrinated her on all the ways the Kouyou family — or rather, the _main family_ — is populated entirely by soulless demons. When she was ten, she saw someone with red hair on the street and spontaneously burst into tears. Her mother had to buy her a new dress to get her to stop.

"Did anyone else want anything?" Her mother continues like she didn't even hear her, sifting through the little objects spread over the table.

Kou plops down on the seat cushion and folds her arms on the table. "Not really. I think Uncle Hiroshi would really like some wine, though. It's hard to get the good stuff out there, and the alcohol they sell over on Kokuyou Street isn't too great. Namimori isn't much better."

"Oh, wine? I have just the thing!" Her mother carefully folds the padded blanket up and bounces over to the cabinet. Kou watches her in wary confusion when she pulls open the cupboards, and her eyebrows shoot up when she removes a panel in the back and pulls out two very expensive-looking wine bottles.

"Mom, that's _dad_ _'s_!"

"Oh, like he's even here to drink it. I doubt he even remembers they're here, it's been so long. Here, look." She sits down and places the two huge bottles on the table so they're facing Kou. "These are good brands. You give Uncle Hiroshi this one," she points at the smaller, less expensive-looking one, "and this other one goes to Uncle Naoki or whoever will take it."

"Mom, I don't think it's a good idea to associate with them!"

"Oh nonsense, they're family, aren't they? I bet every grievance my mom has with them is decades old!"

Kou doesn't have the heart to tell her how wrong she is. "…I'll bring it over at the end of the month."

"Good girl. You want to watch TV?"

"Nah, I'm going up to my room."

Kou gets up. The beads on her new bracelet clack together, and she looks at them mulishly. It's cute, but now reduced to a symbol of her mother's nagging. She supposes she'll come to like them as her wrist heals. Right now it's twanging unpleasantly, so that probably won't be for a while.

She gathers the dotera and the birds and brings them upstairs to her room. It's closed, so she pulls off a sock and turns the handle with her toes. Then she awkwardly grabs her sock with her toes and hobbles inside. Versatility with various appendages is a good thing when you are especially prone to fumbling with whatever's in your hands.

Her room isn't really the average teenage girl's ideal. Or the average teenage anything's ideal. Her room isn't big enough to cram in enough furniture to hold all the knick-knacks she's amassed over the years, and she's not very good at any practical skills that might have helped her case, so the walls are littered with mostly-lopsided shelves in random places, covered with little taxidermy birds, various figurines, and three wooden sculptures of bears catching fish. Some of the bigger shelves hold more delicate things like porcelain dolls and glass sculptures.

While her walls are a mess with an uncanny resemblance to a hoard, the rest of her room is just a plain, run-of-the-mill mess. There's clothes all over the floor, a stack of dishes on the chair in the corner, and her work desk is covered in scattered paper so disorganized she can't remember what belongs to which lesson and when it was due.

Kou puts her new birds up on the nearest shelf and closes the door with her foot so she can hook the dotera on the back. It's a pretty nice one, dark blue and thick, and it's definitely less embarrassing to wear a padded coat rather than a bathrobe when she's at minimum body temperature in the morning.

She peels off her clothes and pulls on a baggy shirt and a pair of sweatpants. Good sleepwear, and easy to take off so she can take a shower first thing in the morning while she's still half-asleep. She's nowhere near competent enough to manage buttons when she's just waking up.

With a satisfied sigh, Kou slumps into her chair, clears the papers off her desk, and pulls out a small chunk of wood and her knife. She scowls down at it, waiting for inspiration to strike. It does not. The wood just sits there, being very wood-like. _Mocking her_. With a noise of distaste, she shaves off a strip of wood. It does nothing to deter the object's refusal to produce a good idea. She looks around her, at the shelves, and sees nothing that really gives her a spark of creativity, or whatever it is that inspires artist-types.

…Fat birds it is, then.

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

Kou wakes up sluggishly to birdsong and a bright sun shining cheerfully through her curtains. She sniffs and swats her face, only just barely managing to coordinate her hand to her mouth to wipe away the drool. She wonders how to best get herself up today; she's especially sensitive to the cold in the mornings, after laying down for so long, and there is no greater suffering than the inevitable temperature shift that comes with actually getting out of bed.

Eventually, she just decides to rush it. She whips the blankets off herself, stumbles to her feet in a half-asleep stupor, and runs out of her room to the bathroom as the temperature difference between the warm, insulating blankets and the crisp morning air seeps into her. She whips her clothes off, practically falls into the shower, and turns the water on.

After a few minutes in the steaming hot water, she can feel her heart begin to throb thickly, using the heat available to start cycling valuable oxygen through her body again. Finally. _Temperature._ She takes a deep breath of thick, damp air and lets it out. She thinks she's awake enough for the morning now. But she got really gross and sweaty yesterday, so she still stays in for a little while longer.

Kou turns the water off, rubs her hair down with a towel, and holds another around herself while she grabs her clothes and dashes back into her room. She slips on her uniform, and, after a moment of thought, the new dotera her aunt Yuuko gave her.

Downstairs, her mom is only just starting breakfast. Kou bounds over. "Morning!"

"Morning, Kou-chan! That coat looks good on you," her mom smiles.

Kou pulls at the edges of the dotera and turns left and right. "Really? I thought I might look like an old fogey."

"I think you're missing the belly-warmer," her mom teases.

Kou sticks out her tongue and gets to setting the table.

She goes back to her project from last night while waiting for breakfast to be ready. She finished the base, and is now starting to carve the delicate lines of the feathers, shaping the twig-like legs underneath as she focuses on the bottom. She doesn't think she has enough paint for it, though; she'll have to stop by the craft store to buy some more.

Then breakfast is served, so she puts the little wooden figure and her knife aside and starts shoveling it in. Her mom watches on with a combination of awe and appreciation. "Hungry today?"

Kou gives a slight tilt of her head to indicate a non-committal deflection. She doesn't have to explain her eating habits. Food is nice and she loves it. Besides, calories are good for her eternally dismal energy levels. She's already building muscle in her thighs, even if her arms are sticks, it makes sense for her to want to pile on the calories…

She hits the bottom of her bowl of rice. Kou glances up at the clock and hums when she sees the time. Only five to seven; she's up early today. She drinks down the rest of her miso soup and hurries her plates to the sink.

"You're going to fall over again if you keep rushing like that," her mom sings at her.

"I'm a busy person," Kou sings back. She takes her bentou box out and scoops the remaining rice into it. "Did you make side dishes?"

"I think I still have some baby potatoes from last night in the fridge."

"Baby potatoes aren't a side dish!" Kou argues, but she still digs through the fridge and empties the plastic container of potatoes into her lunch box. She's not a picky eater, and the specifics of bentou artistry are entirely beyond her. Maybe if she chopped them up. But she's too lazy for that. "What about seasoning?"

"Aren't there salmon flakes? I'm sure I had some lying around."

"Salmon-seasoned rice and baby potatoes," Kou mumbles scornfully at her lunch, but she still grabs the flakes and sloppily covers her rice with it. "Okay, that should be fine."

"I remember when you couldn't make your bentou at all," her mom recalls, waving her chopsticks to and fro. "You set the stove on fire once. Your poor father almost had a heart attack when he heard about it."

Kou flushes. "I'm not used to cooking! There's so much _waiting_! I thought turning it up would be faster!"

"See, I told you, if you don't slow down, you'll get into more accidents."

Kou scowls and continues to move quickly as she wraps her handkerchief around the box with a single hand and her teeth and stuffs it in her school bag. "I'll turn into a slug if I stop, though."

"But you'll be my _safe_ slug," her mom croons.

"Well, your _safe slug_ is going to school now!" Kou pulls the dotera off, wincing at the deprivation of such great heat insulation, and pulls on her usual orange cardigan. She slides across the linoleum to give her mom a quick hug, grabs her whittling things, and then dashes to the door.

"Don't run in the streets!" Her mom calls.

"I won't!" Kou pulls on her wristbands and her new bracelets, careful not to jostle her wrist.

"And remember, _like you only have one hand_!"

"I knoooow!"

"I love you!"

"I love you too! I'm off!"

"Have a nice day!"

Kou yanks on her runners and dashes out the door.

She doesn't think she can actually stop herself from running to school like she's on a time limit. The mid-length commute is just enough to strain her endurance, and it gets her heart pumping, which gives Kou a good second wind that helps her tolerate the steady temperature drop she usually suffers while sitting still in class. So she figures she'll just run on the sidewalks this time.

…So, basically, just like usual. But she won't run across the roads this time, so it's different! …Probably.

There aren't many people out yet, though there's a lot of cars and people on the main streets making their own morning commutes. Most students will be at home for another fifteen to twenty minutes before they're ready to leave. Kou likes leaving early for that exact reason; less people to collide into.

She jogs at an easy pace, watching Namimori coming to life around her as she goes. After getting used to running around town in elementary school, she's coordinated enough to circle around any people who cross her path, and jump over obstacles like empty aluminum cans, unconscious men, and cats. She just wishes that this coordination could extend to more complicated terrains. She only sprained her right wrist this time, but if she doesn't get better, she's going to injure something way more important. Like her legs. Again.

Kou comes upon a stretch of sidewalk completely empty of people, and she instinctively increases her pace to a full sprint. Her feet pound against the cement, and she can feel her blood thundering in her eardrums, the wind whipping through her hair and clothes. She feels more than anything like she's _moving_. She can already feel her temperature soaring, and she'll probably be red-faced by the time she gets to school, and the feeling of skidding on the corner and turning onto the next stretch is so satisfying, she feels like she's on _fire_ _—_

Something hooks on the back of her collar, and Kou is choked by the ribbon of her school uniform. Her lower half goes flying out from underneath her at the sudden tilt in balance, and she falls to the ground in a hacking, breathless heap, clutching at the agony in her throat.

When she finally looks up, it's into the glaring face of a schoolmate.

"Mochida-san," Kou rasps.

Mochida folds his arms and scowls down at her. "What the hell are you doing running down the streets like that? You're going to get yourself killed. You're going to get someone _else_ killed. You trip on _air_."

"There wasn't anyone on the sidewalk, though…"

Kou slowly pulls herself up to her feet and gives Mochida an unfavourable once-over. He's been in the neighbouring class ever since kindergarten, with the exception of their current year in middle school, and Kou doesn't actually know him all that well. She used to, but they drifted apart, on account of him being a boy and popular and responsible and into some sort of sport, and her being a girl and a social pariah and more interested in fleeing clubs than participating in them.

At least he hasn't really changed over the years. Still taller than her, still refusing to brush down his awful mess of black hair, still sort of sneering at her like he thinks she should be enchanted that he is gifting her with his presence.

"…What did you want?" She mumbles, when Mochida doesn't continue to jeer at her.

He stiffens. "What makes you think I want something?"

"You wouldn't talk to me unless you did."

He nods in concession. "…Well, that's true. Listen, you got strong legs, right?"

Kou tilts her head. "I guess?"

"Then I need your help climbing something. C'mere." He grabs her by her good wrist and starts yanking her along, and Kou helplessly falls into step, glaring into the back of Mochida's bedhead. There's a covered sword on his back, and she vaguely remembers he has something to do with kendo. That was the sport he does, right?

He turns on the next road instead of heading in the direction of the school. It's another section of the residential area, all lined by walls. Mochida continues to drag her down the road, then abruptly stops about half a block in. At Kou's questioning look, he points up.

It's a tree.

"You want my help climbing a tree?" Kou asks flatly.

"No, dumbass, I need your help staying in the tree. It's too brittle to hold me, and you're going to have to work it off the branch." He points and tilts his arm a bit. Kou tilts her whole body to see what he's indicating; a simple omamori charm, the kind you can get for cheap at any shrine. Her expression flattens even further. Mochida flushes and adjusts his posture a bit. "A girl gave it to me."

Of course. "Give me a second."

Kou hoists herself up the wall, and manages to grab an overhanging tree branch with one little hop. Mochida is right about it being brittle; it bends under her weight, and she has to skip right into the trunk to get a good, tangible grip. She kicks air for a few seconds before finally gripping the trunk with the soles of her shoes and pushing up far enough to actually get on top of a thicker branch. From there, it's simple enough to slither over, shake the charm out, and drop out of the tree again.

"You got it?"

"Yes, I got it, were you even watching me?" Kou scrambles on top of the wall and turns to check at the house behind her.

There is a teenage girl staring straight at her from one of the windows, hands still holding her curtains.

Kou flushes, holds up the omamori charm, and then points at the tree where it was lodged. The girl furrows her brow and nods, accepting this excuse. Kou practically falls off the wall in her effort to get out of sight and shoves the charm into Mochida's hands.

"There, are you happy?"

"Yeah, thanks," Mochida dismisses, completely losing interest in her now that he got what he wanted. Kou sticks her tongue out him like she's retching and marches off to school.

Unfortunately, Mochida also attends the same school, and immediately follows.

"Soooo," He says, because he can't leave a good, well-rounded silence in peace. "Why don't you join track?"

"I don't join clubs."

Mochida gives her an ugly snort. "Why not?"

"When you think about it, isn't it suspicious? I mean, how many street gangs are there in Namimori?"

"Well, a lot, but it's like that everywhere."

"Right? But how many of those are from middle and high school?"

Mochida scratches his head. "Uh…a…lot?"

Kou points in triumph. "You see! It's weird that it's like that! Isn't it? When you think about what would cause them to form like that, obviously it's the clubs, right? It's the clubs! If there's one thing that groups students together, you're obviously going to think of clubs, right?"

He gives her a blank look. "…There's no gangs in Namimiddle, though."

Kou blinks, not actually expecting a contradiction to her infallible logic. "Huh?"

"There's no gangs at our school. Even if your 'school club gang' theory wasn't _stupid as hell_ , the Disciplinary Committee cleans out everyone who even sneezes wrong. How did you not notice?"

"I don't pay attention to criminal scum," Kou replies resolutely.

Mochida squints and levels her with a suspicious look.

Whatever comment he might have given in response to that is cut short with the call of _'MOCHIDAAAA'_ from down the street. They both look up to see a group of people. They all have long, thin bags like Mochida's on their backs. Presumably swords. Kou silently congratulates herself on correctly recalling Mochida's club.

"Later, dweeb," Mochida says, and runs to meet his friends.

They greet him with laughter and pats on the back. One of them turns back to look at Kou, who is mostly just standing there, wondering why Mochida, who clearly does not deserve nice things, still gets them.

"Why you hanging out with _her_? She's totally brainless, isn't she?"

"Oh, yeah. But we're childhood friends, you know?" Mochida shrugs.

Kou makes the tongue-out retching face again. He makes it right back.

"Do your moms know each other?" One of the boy asks.

"I heard her mom's raising her by herself," says a second.

"Nah, just most of the time. Her dad's never around, but he's pretty cool," Mochida shrugs.

Kou lets her gaze linger on the group, unsure of what she even wants from them. They're talking candidly about her life like she's not even there. Maybe that's a rule of gossip, but she was under the impression that you're supposed to wait until the subject is out of earshot before getting chatty.

She takes a deep breath, turns on her heel, and starts running again.

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

The students are only just starting to file in when Kou arrives at Namimori Middle School. No one else bothers her, and she dances around anyone who could possibly stand between her and her destination. She slips out of her runners into her indoor shoes, hugs her bag to her chest, and dashes up the stairs on pure leg power.

Most of the students don't pay any attention to her, which is…technically how she prefers it. When people pay attention to her, it's usually in a very unpleasant, jeering sort of way. Unfortunately, Mochida's friends aren't an isolated incident. Not that she cares. She's never been particularly desperate for friends, if she wants to talk to someone, there's always everyone in Hakuyou. She's honestly better off by herself, even if it makes for a boring school life.

Kou reaches the very top of the staircase, and the metal door to the roof. She pulls the spare key from around her neck, silently thanks her math teacher for giving her such a rare and precious gift, and pushes forth into the warm and welcoming sunlight. The roof is spotless, as usual, though she's not the one maintaining it. She supposes someone comes here at some other point in the day to keep it clean.

She does a quick sweep for people, peeking around and above the door block, just in case. Satisfied that she's definitely alone up here, she cheerfully goes around to the side and yanks out her futon from underneath the crumpled blue tarp she had placed here at the beginning of the semester. She brings it to the middle of the roof and unfurls it, careful for wrinkles and lumps. As she runs her hands over the surface, she spots…black hairs? She picks one up and rolls it between her fingers. Coarse black hair. Her hair is so soft and thin it's in a perpetual state of floaty frizz, and it's brown, so this obviously doesn't belong to her.

Someone's been _using her futon._

…Oh, well, it's not like they got it dirty, anyway. She drops to her knees and promptly flops over onto her face, finally feeling the exhaustion turn her to jelly. She doesn't even have the energy to flip over. She's done. She's finished. She's dead now. She doesn't even have the energy for outrage.

The sun feels _sooooooooo goooooooooood._

The sounds of arriving students and balls hitting bats echoes in the distance, far beneath her, and she focuses on smooth, easy breaths, building a steady rhythm that makes her feel calm, relaxed, and at ease. After a while, breathing doesn't hurt anymore, and she turns on her back so she can feel the sun against her front too. She wriggles pleasantly. Even her wrist feels better now.

The noises are getting louder and more frequent. The bell is probably going to ring soon. She stretches her legs and arms out, moaning with the strain, and goes limp again. She doesn't really want to get up, but her teacher will yell at her for being late. She doesn't care for homeroom, but she does care for following school policy and not making waves, so…

Kou rolls over and pushes herself to her feet, rolls up the futon, and puts it back under the tarp. She rubs her eyes and squints at the desaturation caused by staring into her eyelids for too long. Everything seems very _blue_.

More students. She shuffles over to the fence and looks over to see a crowd heading into the building. She doesn't have a watch on her, but she guesses she has about fifteen minutes to go—

 _Something is looking at her._

Kou jumps back from the fence and snaps her gaze sharply toward the trees down in the courtyard. A bird emerges from them, and flies up past her. Carefully, she gets closer to the fence and peers suspiciously at the trees. She doesn't see any shapes in them. Her gaze travels along the courtyard, and in the windows, but she just can't see anybody who could have been looking at her with that level of predatory intensity.

Probably just the bird then. Somehow.

Kou goes downstairs.

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

Typically, teachers, especially homeroom teachers, have a parental role in their students lives. They take care of them, manage their lives, and keep them out of trouble. You should be able to go to your teachers for advice, or at least the most rudimentary of guidance in times of trouble. Maybe for a lesson plan or something. Kou wouldn't know, because her homeroom teacher is evil.

Nezu Dohachiro is an especially grouchy man in his fifties who holds the class homeroom, as well as Science. He has an incredibly bad habit of picking out a 'scapegoat student' amongst each of his classes, which is to say, the first person with low test scores to cross his mind. Kou had narrowly escaped this fate last year by pretending to cry and yelling at him for antagonizing a young girl, but she can tell he kinda hates her anyway.

Currently, Kou sits in the second row, two from the right, and the current scapegoat — Okumura Kenta — sits directly behind her, so come Science class, she gets to hear Nezu antagonize a 14-year-old boy in excruciating detail.

"Just a hypothetical situation," Nezu says, passing Okumura's test over so anyone who cares to look can see the huge '20' scribbled in red in the corner. "But if someone got nothing but failing test scores…could it really be said that this person has a future? While everyone was trying their best, that the school resources have to be wasted on someone who can't sum up the effort for even one or two passes, don't you think that _isn_ _'t very fair_?"

Okumura swallows and fidgets. "I-I guess not."

"Then, why wouldn't this child be working hard like the rest of us?"

"I-I don't know sir."

"Surely, you'll do better in the future?"

Okumura nods. "…Yes, sir."

The classroom giggles.

Kou redirects her attention to her own poor grade.

She loses temperature just sitting in one place, but she can't fidget, because then she'll get the full brunt of Nezu's unstoppable pettiness. She's playing it safe, this year. Just because Nezu isn't going to publicly bully her doesn't mean he isn't going to make her life hell in more creative ways. It's better to be invisible, in this school.

Kou does her best to focus on her lessons and do as much as conceivably possible during class, seeing as she never actually remembers to do her homework, and a poorly done lesson is better than no lesson at all. She can hear Okumura's flustered sorting through his work behind her, but she doesn't turn to look. She's decided to just keep her nose out of trouble. Barring Okumura actually crying, she doesn't think she has it in her to pile his problems onto her own.

Kou manages to just barely survive until lunch break, at least. She's had trouble parsing her work for years, but she's getting better at it. Maybe one day she can even do something as ambitious as actually focusing for an entire day. For now, her notes are a diligent list and her worksheets are a pathetic patchwork. It's the best she can do, regardless of what her teachers say.

Free from her student obligations, Kou immediately dashes out of the classroom and races up the stairs. She is glad she took up running at such a young age, it does wonders for her stamina levels. Lately, unless she's been running for a while, all she has to deal with is how much her thighs hurt! She feels she could probably do pretty well as a delivery girl or something.

The door to the roof is still unlocked, and Kou skids to a stop in the middle of the great expanse of featureless cement, looking around. She doesn't bother looking above the landing, since she doesn't really plan on being here too long; recovery naps are for mornings and afternoons. Instead, she just wanders suspiciously to the part of the fence she had looked over before, the one that overlooks the trees in the courtyard. She looks _hard_ this time, or as hard as one can look while unpacking a bentou box while using a fence as a second hand thanks to an injured wrist.

Kou pulls her chopsticks out with the bentou held up by the pressure of her hip against the rusted metal, still looking over in search of Suspicious Characters or Places Suspicious Characters Could Theoretically Be. It's still just the trees, the section between the two parts of the building, and the windows. She stabs a potato and sticks it in her mouth while leaning bodily on the fence. Something about that moment _bugged_ her. Like she was missing something something important about the situation, and her subconscious keeps getting pinged by it.

Kou takes a few bites of cold, dry rice sprinkled with salmon. Maybe she's just being paranoid. The students milling about are perfect reference points for places people could be hiding, and they aren't revealing anything. She can't think of any real reason to think that there was a _person_ there. Or that something interesting would ever happen to her. Nothing ever does.

She leans in farther to watch two first-years sprint across the area, and hears an ominous sort of creaking. It's her only warning.

The thing about Kou, unfortunately enough, is that while she is very fast on her feet, she's not nearly as quick on the uptake. Her instincts are as sharp as the edge of a cucumber. Stupid things like tripping over her own feet and spraining her wrist on a tumble across the forest floor can happen to her because she is simply _not fast enough to react_.

So the fence collapses under her weight.

And Kou isn't fast enough to react.

Everything tilts sideways and the anchor she was leaning against is suddenly victim to spinning gravity, she can barely understand what's happening around her, everything is screaming chaos and twisted metal and grains of rice falling around her. Four storeys. Shrieks of students. The ground rushing to meet her. A enormous, clamorous orange _something_ ringing in her head and pulling at her chest, but even if she listened to it, _she_ _'s not fast enough to react._

She's in too much shock to truly comprehend the fear, so it's nothing more than a disoriented blur. She can see the detail of the grass, streaks of green in brilliant criss-crossed shadows, and it swoops into countless feet, into the school building, into the sky, her sense of gravity turning like a planetary orbit with the firm sensation of fingers clutching her by the waist as her only tether.

She can feel one of her toes gently graze the ground. She lets it down, followed by the ball of her foot, her heel, and the other foot as well, so that she's standing. On the ground. Safely. The grip is released. She is gazing in stunned, wide-eyed terror at the tree in front of her, but she sort of has the impression that people are staring at her. This is not new, but considering this staring is in reaction to her clearly destroying school property and being miraculously rescued from her own hubris, her face manages to heat up anyway.

Her bentou sits pathetically upturned at her feet.

Slowly, she turns around to look her saviour dead in the eyes.

He's a tall man. Broad-shouldered. Good-looking. Foreign. Eyes like glittering pieces of flint, black and searching in a way that makes Kou's skin crawl, even if it makes sense to check her over after what just happened. He's wearing a black fedora that matches his expensive-looking black suit, with the orange band mirroring his orange shirt. His hair is wiry and thick, sticking out from under his hat in jagged angles formed from the twist of curls and presumably a spot of mousse, and the long, thin hairs leading from his sideburns are twirled into loose half-spirals.

This is quite possibly the sketchiest person Kou has ever had the misfortune of meeting. And that's _including_ her extended family.

"The school should have been maintaining those," the man says after a moment, in perfect Japanese, "you should probably sue."

"I-I'm fine, thanks," Kou breathes, inching away slowly.

The man narrows his eyes and looks at her with the grimness of a reaper. _"You should sue."_

"Are…are you a lawyer?"

The man, concerningly, does not feel the need to deign that with an answer. Instead, his onyx-black eyes flick down, towards her skirt. They hold there for a while, which Kou finds most concerning of all, before glancing up at the students, who abruptly stop whispering at each other about the whole 'student nearly falling to her death' thing. He seems to be searching for something in their reactions, and after what feels like forever, he finally looks satisfied.

He redirects his attention towards Kou.

"I'm looking for the principal's office."

She lifts a trembling hand and points him in that general direction. He nods, and leaves.

There's a strained silence in his absence, of a moderately sized group of people all witnessing something weird together, and not being sure if there's really any point in communicating the weirdness at all. Most of them are staring at Kou again. Feeling twice as self-conscious now, she carefully picks her bentou box off the ground and quietly laments its loss. Her lid is underneath a pile of fence shrapnel, and she has to work to pry that out too. Very clumsily, of course, thanks to her wrist. Something about the pathetic sight seems to re-activate at least half the student's brains, and the rest continues as per usual.

"Haha! No-brains Kou is so clumsy she really almost got herself killed this time!" The first one to recover laughs.

The students titter, and others join in.

"How did she even survive this long?"

"The fence doesn't even look that rusted, I bet she tripped right into it."

"Hey, No-Brains, why don't you join the basketball team and trip into the opponents for us?"

"Don't let her into your team, you'll be guaranteed to lose!"

Kou tilts her head to look at the sky.

She's kinda happy that fall didn't kill her. A little bit.

Deciding that the bullying is getting a little too exaggerated a little too quickly, she decides to derail the little antagonism session before it really gets going.

"Ah!" Kou fake-winces, clutching her wrist. She pretends no one else is around while she inspects it. "It hurts…It must have gotten sprained…from, uh. Whiplash. Probably."

The insults cut out into uncertainty now that she is no longer safe and unharmed — which is to say, an acceptable target. You don't pick on someone who gets in a terrible accident and comes out _injured,_ after all. That's a genuinely mean thing to do by society's standards, and there's nothing middle school teenagers are more terrified of than being held accountable for being monstrous assholes.

"You should go to the infirmary," a girl suggests hesitantly.

"You're right," Kou simpers. "I _should_ do that."

"Why don't you go find your boyfriend _Mochida_ to help you," some rude rando that Kou doesn't care about sneers.

"Haha, who would ever want _Mochida_ to be their boyfriend," Kou laughs, and then, realizing that's too aggressive for an Unacceptable Injured Target, immediately switches back to nervous simpering again.

The witnesses eventually lose interest and leave. Making fun of Kou is ultimately less exciting than running to their friends and gossiping about Kou falling off a building and nearly dying. If Kou had friends, she would probably do the same. Well, she'd see that the person is okay and has someone to take care of them first, because she's not a jerk, but maybe the nine courtyard witnesses just weren't the kind of people to do that. Maybe if the same thing happened with nine other students, they'd all escort her in a swarm, or something.

But she did not get those hypothetical nine alternate students. So she's alone.

She should probably be more anxious about that, but years of having to deal with this and the constant support and encouragement of her grandmother has trained her out of the ability to actually experience social stress, she thinks. So, sure. Sure, she can go to the infirmary alone. It isn't that big of a deal, and if she had to worry about anything that just happened, it would be that that foreigner really freaks her out and she hopes she never ever meets him again.

Kou darts between students to get to the infirmary, careful not to run, and has to hop on one foot through the door because a crowd of four had decided to stop in front of it, giving her very little room for her legs to maneuver. She stumbles, rights herself, and looks around.

The school nurse, Hamada Ayame, is reviewing something on her desk. She glances over her shoulder and looks dully at her. "What is it this time?"

Kou holds her hand up pathetically. "I…theoretically sprained my wrist falling off the roof?"

"Oh my- let me see," Hamada startles, rushing over to check Kou over, first for injuries, then for the wrist. Her fluster dies at the sight of the bandage underneath her sweatband. "…Theoretically."

"I did fall off the roof! But someone caught me before I could get hurt."

" _Caught_ you?"

"He kinda just…grabbed me by the waist and spun me around once? For velocity reasons, maybe? it seemed to work fine," Kou shrugs.

"Wha- _who_?"

"A foreign guy."

"A foreign guy, it's always _the foreign guys,_ " the nurse sighs, like this isn't even the first time this has happened.

"Soooo, now the fence is all over the courtyard and I'm hiding out in here."

"All over the…for goodness sake, you're a handful. I'll go tell the principal, and talk about proper safety measures," she groans, and marches off into the hall.

Kou gently pulls the door almost-closed behind her to block most of the sounds outside and glances around again. The school infirmary is small and peaceful, all white and green curtains, and Hamada's desk is disorganized in a comfortingly lived-in sort of way. She slowly makes her way across the floor with swinging steps, careful to see if anyone is occupying the beds, but she's in luck; there's no one here.

She slumps on the nearest bed and flops over. Her wrist is kind of throbbing, but at least she somehow managed to avoid jolting it. At least, at least, at least. It occurs to her that she is way too optimistic for someone whose life sucks this much. She can't complain, seeing as she is pretty optimistic about it.

Right. Noon. She pulls the waistband of her skirt up and gently pulls the estrogen patch just under it off, flinching at the odd sensation. She discards it in the nearest trashcan and then continues laying on the bed with her legs dangling off the edge, arms akimbo. She should probably do some running exercises, but then again, Hamada may actually strap her to the bed and leave her there if she finds out.

Kou lets out a heavy breath, closes her eyes, and tries to rela—

 _Someone is watching her._

She leaps to her feet and whips her head to the window. There's a flicker of a moving shadow, but she can't tell if it's from the leaves just outside or a person leaving. Her heart is hammering painfully in her chest. She can feel goosebumps roll through her like thousands of icebergs breaking the surface. She feels cold and dizzy and hyper-vigilant.

Slowly, carefully, Kou gets up and makes her way to the window. Nothing jumps out at her. When she opens it and peeks outside, there are no hidden shapes. Whoever was looking at her must have taken off. She finds this more alarming than the concept of someone hiding, because now she can't ask anyone how on earth she could _feel someone looking at her._ Once again, she is struck with the thought that she's missing something. Cold sweat is trickling down her spine.

Someone knocks at the door, and Kou jumps three feet and screams like she's dying.

There's a startled silence, as one would expect if you knocked on a door and the sound of someone being brutally murdered erupted from the room you were looking to enter. Kou sinks to the floor and groans. That scared the _hell_ out of her. She's not normally this jumpy.

Slowly, carefully, the door opens, and a head of mid-length brown hair peeks out from around the edge. Kou straightens as she makes direct eye contact with the terribly, horribly, wonderfully familiar face of fellow second-year Sasagawa Kyouko.

Sasagawa Kyouko probably has no place talking to someone like Kou. She is the school idol. As in, the entire school idolizes her. She's the Namimori Middle School Madonna. Her soul is as pure as untrodden white snow, she regards everyone with kindness, and she is always optimistic without fail. There is not a single aspect about this girl that is not totally perfect. She's even in Leadership. Kou could never take Leadership. She took Home Economics and managed to put herself in irreversible debt doing hypothetical taxes and set the stove on fire.

She's also very, very pretty.

Kyouko flashes her a hesitant smile. Kou slides down a little bit farther, lets a sloppy, nervous smile pull at her lips, and sums up the courage to stand. "Ha, haha! Hello, Kyouko-chan! Funny seeing you here! In the infirmary! What brings you here? To the infirmary?"

"The boxing club ran out of supplies," Kyouko says.

Kou stares blankly at her.

"My brother is in the boxing club," Kyouko explains.

"Oh. Oh! Of course…of course he is! In the boxing club! Hahaha!" Kou swings off to the side and practically throws herself into the storage cupboards. Kyouko can only watch in muted horror as Kou flops all over the shelves with impressive ragdoll-like physiology as she collects various bandages, types of gauze, every kind of adhesive bandage one would typically put on a body, and various bottles of antiseptic. She knows she is probably making a fool of herself, and may actually drop these because of her wrist, but it would just be another day in the life of Sawada Kou, human trainwreck.

She collects all of the items into the handkerchief of her bentou, ties it, and thrusts it into Kyouko's hands. "Okay, so there's the strip bandages, always a classic, the segmented bandages for fingertips — those are the ones that look like butterfly wings — and the knuckles — the segmented ones — as well as the butterfly closure type for holding cuts. Then there's some tensor bandages and triangle bandages for the usual, you know, getting gored, impaled, and generally sliced open? I'm not sure when you'd need those, barring, say, a bear attack. Aha! Ahaha. Hahaha."

Kyouko looks uncharacteristically serious. Like the boxing club fighting bears is an actual potential problem.

"…Haaaa okay. Is that all you need?"

"You sure know a lot about first aid," Kyouko says, examining the bundle.

"My lack of coordination is notorious amongst my doctors. As are my very brittle bones. Hamada-sensei has given up on me entirely. If I told her that the stuff I took was for me, she'd probably give me more," Kou continues to laugh, very awkwardly.

Kyouko looks mildly horrified. The cold sweat on the nape of Kou's neck has yet to abate.

"But I'm okay! I mean, obviously. So you're all set! I'm going to go lie down now. Have fun!" And with that, Kou sprints across the room and dives into the safety of a curtained bed, where she can bury her furiously blushing face in the pillow in peace. She's not normally a very anxious person, but with Kyouko, she's a _mess_.

"Okay, uhm…thank you?" Kyouko calls.

There's a little bit of hesitation, like Kyouko expected a response. Getting none, she leaves and closes the door behind her.

Now that she's alone again, Kou lets out a long, tortured groan, and flops over on her back to stare at the ceiling with her hands resting on her stomach. Today isn't a good day for her. Maybe someday she can channel her casual, all-accepting can't-do attitude into confronting her bullies, or actually talking to Kyouko normally, but until then, she's sitting steady in the darkest depths of inadequacy and invisibility.

And yet.

Kou holds her hands to her hot face and lets out a quiet, thrilled squeal. _"I really got to talk to Kyouko-chan!"_

* * *

 **AN:**

About the story: There's two facets. One, I wanted to spitewrite an actually reasonable "genderbend", and another is to write a story for an entirely different demographic without justifying any of the absurd bullshit the ~marketed to ages 11-15~ manga pulled off. I mean, I love doing that? But I wanted to try something more flexible.

The entire point of KHR was that Tsuna was a feeble-hearted good-for-nothing who wasn't appealing unless he got his act together, and if you flip the genders 1:1, it will break the story; a lot of Tsuna's traits aren't considered awful and unappealing on a girl! Meekness and admiring people from a distance aren't pathetic, they're the gold standard, and aggression is the ugly stuff. If you wanted the Point of KHR to translate (expectations being forced upon an average, somewhat unappealing kid).

Unlike DET, which is just As Many Hijinks As I Can Physically Manage, this is very dry, languid, and strictly paced, which is why I burnt out on it, because I wasn't sure I was far gone enough to write an actual honest-to-god original novel about pieces of KHR.

 _WELL I CLEARLY AM NOW_


	2. That Girl From Japan (Side B)

**CHAPTER 2**

 **That Girl From Japan (Side B)**

* * *

In a quiet hotel room, a man gets out of the shadow, a slight limp to his gait based more in the rigid line of his shoulders than an injury in his leg. The tension persists even as he takes a seat on his bed, and doesn't leave until he lights a long, thin pipe with a match and takes a long drag of golden smoke.

With each drag, a cobweb of invisible lichtenberg shapes along his chest glows, and with each exhale, it dims.

When the tension is lost entirely, he sticks the pipe between his teeth and makes a phone call.

"Reborn," he greets. "Made contact."

" _Have you found your targets?"_

"I have found _a_ target." His fingers trace along the manila folder containing the details of his job. "Subject isn't in any immediate danger, at the moment, but again, I made contact. Bound to change, and soon."

" _Take care of it soon, then."_

"Okay. Question, though." Reborn opens the folder and picks up the file inside. His eyes tilt speculatively at the ceiling and the pipe bounces around between his front teeth. "What did you say the kid's name was, again?"

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

School ends without fanfare. Students head home. Kou doesn't feel the crawling sensation of someone looking at her, but she still takes a different route back home, and keeps an eye on everyone she passes. It seems paranoid, but without a resolution to that skin-crawly discomfort, she can't help herself. Everything feels like an enemy right now.

Her mom is making dinner when she comes home. Kou had figured she'd be going to eat out tonight when she got up this morning, but now she's seriously worried about being stalked and, well, _dinner_ _'s being made,_ so there's no way she's leaving the house. It just isn't happening. She wonders if she can fly not leaving the house for the next week.

"How was your day at school, Kou-chan?" Her mom calls.

"I fell off the roof," Kou states flatly.

Her mother shoots out of the kitchen and gives Kou a laser-scan-intense once-over. Once it's clear Kou is completely unharmed, she lets out a breath of relief and folds her arms. "How do you keep getting into these situations?"

Kou tilts her head. "I dunno. It's not like I was being clumsy."

"Was something loose?"

"Oh— yeah, the fence. I was just leaning on it while I was eating." Kou circles around to check what's for dinner, and grins when she sees rice and meat. Usually, after they have a meat dish, they'll have stir fry the next day. "Some shady-looking foreigner saved me."

"Foreigner?" Her mom leans her head against her hand thoughtfully. "Hmmm…a lot of foreigners do come through here…How hurt do you think you would have gotten?"

"Uhm…I dunno how much it takes to kill someone," Kou muses.

Her mom gasps. "Kou-chan! Don't say you could have _died!_ Oh, we should compensate him, don't you think? How'd he save you?"

"Eh…? Oh, he sorta…" Kou gestures with her hands in the air. "Y'know, plucked me out of the sky…?"

"Oh, that's so incredible! I need to ask the school about who he is! Ah, ah, and I have to complain about the fence being loose too!" Her mom wanders back and forth, looking for the phone. Kou watches her go, feeling a bit wrong-footed. She hadn't thought of the risk of death; it was mostly really confusing, and the shady guy _was_ pretty shady. She doesn't know what he was doing at her school but…

But…

 _Careful. It_ _'s a dark world out there._

"Ah! Maybe…" Kou chases after her mom and grabs her arm to stop her from picking up the phone. "Mom! He was _really_ shady! And you know, I didn't notice the fence coming free because I could feel someone staring at me! And he was in the exact position to pluck me out of the air! Isn't that suspicious?"

"Eh…" Her mom takes the phone and clutches it to her breast, looking a little wrong-footed herself. "…You think…?"

"He kept insisting I sue! I bet he works for some shady law firm!"

"There's no shady law firms in Namimori, Kou-chan. All the shady people are in realty," her mom says doubtfully.

"Exactly! _That_ _'s why he's foreign!"_

Her mom gasps. "That could be right! Kou-chan, you're so diligent around criminal types! Let's see…We don't know if he's a good person or not, so let's just ignore him and keep our noses out of trouble, okay?"

Kou sags to the floor in relief and nods. Her mom dials up the school, and Kou scoots back into the kitchen while her mom is occupied. The rice and meat will take a while, but she could get a snack or something…

" _Just WHAT are you spending the school budget on, letting things like that happen! My daughter could have DIED!"_

Or maybe she can go hide out in her room.

She fishes the dotera from the chair and pounds up the stairs, quick to get away from _that_ conversation. There's just something weird and unpleasant about being the centre of attention, positive or negative, and hearing someone make a fuss about her is excruciating. Even if it _is_ her mom. Everyone down in Hakuyou is like that too; there's just something in their blood that drives them to make a fuss about every little thing, and Kou, who wants everything as neutral as possible, just can't stand it.

Her pathetic bird waits for her on her table. She falls into her seat and starts picking at it. This one is going to look up, she thinks. Practice with posture and stuff. She should also work on feather detailing, if only to burn time doing anything but read manga.

The conversation downstairs tapers out quickly, and Kou spends the next few hours enjoying her quiet time. She eventually relocates to the floor so she can cycle her legs through the air, since jiggling them make it harder to keep her knife still. She's collected a bunch of wood shavings all over her shirt when her mom calls up to her.

"Kou-chan! Dinner!"

"Coming!" Kou leaps to her feet, and winces at the strain on her joints. She dusts off the shavings, tosses the knife and bird onto her bed, and flies downstairs, where her mom is almost done setting the table. "Everything all done with?"

"They didn't say what that man was there for, but they'll be funneling funding back into maintenance," her mom says primly, stirring her seasoning into her rice with a rigid posture.

"That's parental influence for ya," Kou sighs. She hopes the teachers won't take it out on her.

"Of course! It's your safety in question! Everyone has their hands full enough with you flinging yourself around willy-nilly," her mom jabs at her with her chopsticks, "there's no way I'm letting you get _accidentally_ hurt on top of that!"

"W-Well, it turned out okay in the end…"

"And now that I told them to work on their basic maintenance, it'll always be okay. You see, that's why you have to keep on top of these things!"

"I suppose…" It would be bad if she just left it, she supposes. But there are somethings you just can't fix with a phone call. If her mom found out about the bullying and raised a complaint, the student body would _tear her apart_. Kou supposes it's a matter of picking battles, and all that.

"Oh yes, almost forgot…" Her mom turns to gesture at the cabinet. "Mochida-san and Koizumi-san accidentally left their things here. Why don't you help out a little and deliver those tomorrow?"

"Ah, sure. What kind of things?"

"Koizumi-san forgot her jacket, and Mochida-san left her pens."

"Huh…" Kou focuses on the pens her mom was gesturing to.

And gets an idea.

" _Huuuh."_

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

Getting up early is easy enough. Kou does it frequently, and it's easier to get out of bed when she has things to do.

Her shower is painfully short, and she speeds through the kitchen, shoving random crap into her bentou as her mom watches with bemusement.

"Got somewhere to go?"

"Sorta," Kou says, roughly tying the handkerchief around her lunch. She looks around, and finds Mochida-san's nib pens. They gotta be at least 2000 yen each, which ranges into 'not worth buying again' territory, so it's an understandable return. With a grin, she uses them to hold the knot.

"Gotta go love you!" She gives her mom a quick peck on each cheek and rampages right out the door. She veers off down the road in the opposite direction of the school, swings over the brick fence of the house on the corner of the 4-way, and lies in wait for her prey to arrive, hanging off the top with her bentou in her teeth.

She doesn't have to wait long. After a few false alarms from other kids heading off to school, she finally peeks over to see the ever-familiar untamed mass of black hair walking underneath her. With a triumphant cry, she swings right over and nearly nails Mochida in the skull.

" _Agh!_ What the hell!"

"Mochidaaaa!" Kou yanks the pens out from the knot and waves them in front of his face. "Your mom left her fancy pens at our house."

"Did you have to leap over a fence to give me this? Do it at school!"

"Is that any way to talk to your _childhood friend_?" Kou clasps her hands together.

Mochida narrows his eyes. "You want something."

"What makes you say that?"

"You would never willingly call us friends if you didn't."

"Ha, yeah. Listen, listen, can I walk with you after school?" Kou leans forward with the best puppy-dog eyes she can muster. Her eyes are really small and she doesn't have lashes thick enough to gaze through, so it's probably not very effective, but it's the thought that counts.

Mochida flushes. "What! No! You're a girl! Do you have any idea what people would say if they saw me walking home with you?"

"Cool. Don't care. I'm being stalked!" She looks around suspiciously. "Remember when I fell off the roof yesterday?"

"That was _you_?"

"… _SO_ , I fell off because the fence fell off, right? But the guy who caught me was like, right there, and I've been feeling someone stare at me the entire day. And he's like, a foreigner? And an adult? _What_ _'s a foreign adult doing at our school, Mochida_!"

"Why are you so strung out about criminals? Good lord. And if you're begging, why don't you talk to me with more familiarity!" Mochida shoves an accusing finger in her face.

Kou blinks. "…Mochida-sama?"

"We've known each other for years, I'm talking _familiar!_ Why don't you ever use my first name! Do you know how uncool it is being badgered by a girl I've known for years who doesn't think enough of me to consider me a familiar face? Huuuh?"

"Mochida is Mochida, though."

Mochida slaps either side of her face and squishes her face together until her lips are mashed into fishlips. "Say it! Keeeensuuuukeeee!"

"If you want me to fulfill your childhood friend fantasy, should I call you Ken-chan? Should I pick you up from your house every day?" Kou grumbles.

" _We_ _'re not friends._ And this is just not being rude!"

"How is it not being rude if we're not friends!"

" _It just is!"_

They struggle in spot for a moment, Kou trying to pry her head out of Mochida's clutches and Mochida trying to pin her out of spite. When she finally manages to drag her face out, her jaws ache.

"Fine, fine, Keeensuuuukeeee. I'm serious about the stalker, though," Kou whines.

"How do you even get yourself into this kind of trouble," he mutters, rubbing the back of his head. "Fine. Stick around during practice if you need a meat shield."

"Thank youuuu, Kensuke-kuuuun!" Kou squeals, flinging her arms around him. "You're the best childhood friend ever!"

"I'm the only person you knew as a child, where's the competition," he grunts, but pats her on the back anyway.

Task completed, Kou shoves the pens into his hand and sprints to school. She's even earlier than usual, and there's barely anyone around. She zips right by the first perky sports club stragglers coming in for morning practice and heads right for the stairwell. The first floor has about three kids, but after that, nobody. The teachers are still setting up for the day, so she never sees them during her rooftop trips either. Nobody is in school at this hour.

She's so confident in that fact that she runs full-speed into a student emerging from a classroom.

Books go airborne. Kou almost falls down the stairs. Everything is terrible.

" _Hiiiii!_ I'm so sorry!"

Her unfortunate victim is Okumura. He had been carrying a bunch of books and a few looseleaf papers, which have now been sent flying to the four corners of the earth. Okumura himself is sprawled over the ground, looking shellshocked.

"O-Okumura-kun?"

"…It's fine." He sits up and smooths down his straight-cut hair. Okumura is a little smaller and a lot less bony than she is, and running into him at that speed must have totally annihilated him. It's hard to tell if he's upset or not, though, with the permanent furrow of his brow. She quickly starts gathering up his books before he can get at them. He moves very slowly and limply, as if his every pore exudes patheticness, and Kou doesn't want to feel worse than she already does for colliding into him.

"I'm sorry I wasn't watching where I was going. I've just been a little on edge," Kou laughs nervously.

Okumura pauses. "…On edge?"

"Ah…uhm…actually, I think I have a stalker." She shuffles in closer. "Did you see the foreign guy who came in yesterday?"

"Oh. Yeah. He was scouting out the school buildings?"

"Right, and he caught me out of the air, and I've been feeling watched this whole time?" She shoves the books back into Okumura's hands. "I don't know what he wants, but…You should stay safe too, Okumura-kun! If he's like, a shady law guy, he might be the type to break kids' legs and make them sue the school or something!"

His mouth crooks down and he scratches his head again. "…Okay?"

"Sorry again! Really sorry!" Kou leaps upright and starts sprinting up the stairs again, more out of embarrassment than excess energy this time. Her mom agreed with her theory easily enough, but she's starting to get the feeling people aren't taking the stalker thing very seriously. Man, will her getting horribly murdered sure show them!

Kou bursts through the door to the roof and yanks out her futon out from under her tarp. The seasons are starting to bleed into summer, now, so the mornings are long and full of sunshine, and she's able to do this way more than usual. Once fall hits, she'll have to switch to the literature club's kotatsu; they let her sleep in there since they only meet after school. In winter, she switches over to the manga club's kotatsu in exchange for her services as an assistant for their doujinshi projects. She has a place to sleep for every time of the year.

Kou pauses in her futon smoothing when she sees the gap still cut into the fence, now lined with caution tape. She steps toward it hesitantly. The fence is set up in sections, so the area around it isn't particularly damaged. She can see why it fell off; someone damaged the cement around the bolts keeping it in place, and her pressing on it and releasing it must have wiggled them free. The bolts around the other parts of the fence are still perfectly intact.

She peers over the edge. The fallen chunk of fence is gone, but there's deep scars in the dirt, now, and the line of bushes at the bottom have been crushed down a bit. It strikes her how high up the roof really is.

Kou slowly steps backwards, and decides to replace the bad thoughts with sunbathing. She collapses onto her futon and flings her arms akimbo, soaking in the warmth. She's taken care of most it, and if the stalker acts, well, that's more material for the police! Or even the more closely moderated criminals. It's unsettling to think about, but if she just left a message at the clinic, her problem would probably _mysteriously disappear._

Her family is so creepy.

As the rays really seep in, Kou's train of thought dissipates, and she hums in contentment. The air feels crisp and satisfying. She's okay.

She hardly feels the prick.

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

It takes Kou what feels like hours before she fully wakes up.

She's _freezing._

Kou shivers and curls into a ball, and flinches at the crinkle of…the tarp?

She blearily swats outward, and flinches again when her hand impacts against, yes, the tarp. She swings again, harder, trying to tear it away. It takes forever, and it isn't until she's kneeling on the futon that she can properly lift it from the ground.

It's night.

Kou stares at the dark sky, unable to have a coherent opinion on that. She staggers to her feet and nearly falls onto the fence in front of her. Through her spinning vision, she can see the lights of the houses around her, and the twinkling yellow-orange city lights beyond, glowing strong enough to overpower the stars. Stars? It's night. Her head is _killing_ her.

She stumbles out into the open, and looks back and forth with a tight frown. She…was back under the tarp with the futon, next to the door, where she usually leaves it. She doesn't understand. Why was she under the tarp? When did she fall asleep?

Kou almost falls over walking back to the door, and she shakes the handle a few times before it occurs to her to turn it.

It's locked.

Kou stares at the doorknob.

Still locked.

She whips her head around, and yelps at the sharp jab of pain in her neck the action causes. She slaps a hand over it on instinct. There's a bump. When she presses it, it aches, like a bruise.

There's…a bump on her neck. A wound. What does that mean? She can't think, everything is so out of focus, _why_. She feels like she's missing something important and she's _so cold_ and she's scared and confused and she needs…she needs…Her bag?

Kou staggers back to the tarp and falls to her knees looking around. Her bentou is here, but she can't find her bag. No…She never brought her bag. She left her bag at home. Nothing in her bag can help her now. All she has is…

She has to lean against the wall to keep her balance. She's trapped on a roof, with a bump on her neck, and she's dizzy, and she woke up in a different place than where she fell asleep.

It snaps into place.

 _She was drugged._

"Oh no," Kou whines. "Ooohhh no."

She knew there was a stalker, she knew, she went to sleep congratulating herself on how she knew that, and now the stalker drugged her and stashed her out of sight, locked her up here, and she should have been more _careful_ _…_

Why her? Why bother with someone like her? Is she a hostage? This is so… _she doesn_ _'t understand._

Kou pulls herself back to her feet and looks around. She has to get off the roof, clearly. Before the stalker comes back. The stalker put her here for a reason and now she has to go right now. She has to…she has to…

She shuffles over to the only real opening on the roof; the gap in the fence. Her breath comes in short, but she forces it into moderation. Can't hyperventilate now. Her brain needs the oxygen. She _can_ do something with this, she _can_ escape. There's no one who can help her now, not even Mochida, but she can do something here. She can do something about this situation. Sure.

"Told him…" she mutters, running trembling hands over the sides of the fence. "Told him I was stalked, bet he didn't…didn't believe, didn't look, didn't…"

Her fingers snag on the caution tape. She frowns at it, and for lack of better ideas, starts working on the knots. Even if the stalker burst through the door right now, it's not like she would have a better way of going about this. She's too dizzy to run. Caution tape works. All she has to do is unwind them all on one side, and then…

Yes, she knows what she's doing now. She has an idea. Braiding is a lot easier than picking at tightly secured strips of plastic, thankfully, and it barely takes her a minute to tie them all together. She looks over the roof, sees nothing left to help her, and wraps the end of the braid around her hand.

"Here goes nothing," she breathes.

Kou jumps off the roof.

Even while holding onto the braid with her other hand and bracing against the side of the school, the whiplash _hurts_. The added security barely compensates for her sprained wrist. She's almost jerked right off, and it takes a great deal of scrambling to get secure again. She wish she knew how to rappel, but here she is, dangling like a buffoon off the roof of the school. Everyone is going to go to school tomorrow to find a red smear out back. Congratulations to her.

Kou grits her teeth and gets a better foothold, nudging over so she's situated right over the window below. She stretches at the braid, and figures she'll be practically inside the window if she unwinds it from her hand a bit. Her head is a little clearer with the looming threat of death, but her centre of gravity is less than stellar, at the moment. It's a 50/50 chance.

Hey, she's dead if she doesn't do it, so what the hell. Kou kicks at the edge of the window, trying to nudge it open. Her sneaker rubs against the glass, and she prays to the gods that look over Namimori that it'll work, that for once in her life something will go right and it'll—

It slides open.

Kou lets out an explosive sigh of relief. She shoves a foot inside, puts all her weight on one leg and one arm, and unwinds the braid once. She slides down slowly. Foot still isn't at the bottom. She does it again. Still not far enough.

Her wrist is sprained; it won't be able to take the strain of holding up her weight. If she unwinds it one more time, she'd be depending entirely on one arm. She'd slip from the rope. Kou glances down.

But she might be far down enough to grab the top of the windowsill.

Kou takes a deep breath, steels herself, and unwinds one more time. Her grip slips. Her tip-toe just barely touches the bottom of the sill. She hops herself over, putting her other foot in, and lets go of the braid.

There's a moment of weightlessness, her stomach bottoming out, and her body swinging back too far for her hands to grab the top of the window, but her heels dig in and her strong, reliable legs yank her back into place just in time to catch the sides. Her wrist falters, and she swings on the grip of one arm and bumps into the side of the building with her legs just barely keeping her in place.

She sits there, thighs and ass hanging out to be caressed by the icy midnight winds, probably looking like a dumb asshole. After a moment to collect herself, she finally trusts her muscles enough to start nudging her whole body back inside.

Operation: Escape The Roof is a success. Now she has to find a way out of the school itself. She's still not in running condition, and her dizziness almost cost her just now. Things aren't looking good.

Kou tip-toes through the classroom. Everything is dead silent, so quiet that her own breathing sounds like a scream. She squeezes her eyes shut and open them in a helpless attempt to clear her vision. Her head still feels like someone emptied a bowl of screws into it and rattled them around for an hour. And then dumped the results into a swishing tub of water.

Kou can walk, at least, and with enough care, she can translate that into tip-toeing. It's way harder than it should be. Still, she keeps her head up and focuses on the hallway around her and the route she needs to take; she needs to get to the ground floor. Or to the stairs, first? It's so close, she just needs to get there. Maybe just keep moving until she can trust herself with a good sprint.

She has to lean on the banister of the stairs, but that gives her the security to move faster. She might actually make it. Kou gives up on the tip-toes and starts power-walking towards the exit. It's so easy when she hits flat ground, _almost, almost, almost._ She surges forward, and—

Smells woodsmoke.

Kou freezes. There's woodsmoke, and…a squeaking noise. Almost like shoes against linoleum.

"Ooohh no," she breathes. "Nooononono."

Kou whirls on her heel and starts power-walking as quietly as she can towards the back exit. She can hop the fence, right? Right.

The squeaking breaks into crisp, clacking footsteps.

 _To hell with walking._

Kou _bolts_. She nearly topples over, as expected, but she somehow manages to compensate for the imbalance as she runs. Her feet slam down against the ground like hammers, thundering at full speed. She slides at a turn, and her feet skid out from underneath her. Kou yelps as she collides into the ground shoulder-first, and scrambles to get back up again. The footsteps haven't changed pace.

Kou turns another corner by sprinting full-force into the wall and bouncing forwards. She has no idea how far away the woodsmoke stalker is. God she wish Mochida were here to get her out of this, but he doesn't really like her as it is, he probably didn't even tell her mom she never showed up. _She doesn_ _'t want to die like this._

Kou can only just barely see the outlines of the hallway in the dark, so she doesn't see the shape emerging from a classroom, right into her path.

She collides with the other person in a bony mess. She bashes her head against the wall, and an elbow connects painfully with her ribs.

"Augh, wha—" The shape shoves her away, and a blinding light erupts from their hand. Kou squints against the beam of the flashlight and mops away the tears it causes. The beam tilts away from her. "…Sawada?"

Kou blinks away the spots in her eyes. She recognizes this person. In fact, this is the second time today she's run into him. "O...Okumura-kun."

Okumura looks her over with a perplexed look on his face. He's looking rumpled, and the overcoat he's wearing is twice his size. He looks a bit like he's been shrunken in the wash. He also looks like he might have been crying. "What are you doing in school so late?"

"I…I…" Her eyes water for a different reason.

The footsteps pick up speed.

She grabs Okumura by the shoulders. "Nevermind! Get out of here! There's someone in here with us, GO!"

Okumura gets the hint. He takes off down the hall, towards the double-doors at the end. Kou dives into the classroom and yanks the heaviest object she can pick up, which turns out to be a chair. She can hear Okumura stop at the end of the hallway, and the doors shaking.

"It's locked!"

Kou thought it might be, though she's not sure why. She skids back into the hall and wields the chair by the back, glaring at the corner. If the door's locked, they'll have to run right past the woodsmoke stalker, and she'll need to give them a moment of pause to pull that off.

There's…something odd, going on down that hall, though. There's the light from Okumura's flashlight, sure, but she can see a strange, flickering glow being cast over the distant walls, and she's not sure where it's coming from. The sound of quick yet unhurried footsteps has reached the end of the hall ahead. The stalker should emerge in the next thirty seconds, at this rate.

"What are _you_ doing here?" She asks, if only to ease her nerves.

"…It's just…some classmates hid my stuff," he mumbles. Unsurprising. Kou feels bad for ignoring him, though, if it's gotten this bad. Gets bullied every day, and murdered for his trouble. Sucks to be him.

He shakes the door again, a little more desperately this time. "Uh…Should we…should we bash the door in?"

"I don't think the outdoor locks work like that," she laughs.

The steps are closer. Her grip on the chair is sweaty. Every sound is a strange ripple through her dizzy mind.

And there's the stalker.

She had it right the first time.

The strange foreigner stands in the centre of the hallway, legs spread in a secure pose, and fedora tilted over his eyes. He's wearing an overcoat, now, with a bright yellow silk scarf that matched the band of his hat. In one white-gloved hand, he has a green walking stick; in the other is a pipe as thin as a cigarette holder, wafting a strange golden smoke that is clearly giving off light, bright and glittery as dust motes in sunlight.

Kou's hands are trembling, even with her grip on her chair. He's so much taller than she is.

The foreigner takes a step forward with his impeccable, gleaming black shoes. She flinches and staggers back. He takes another step, the sound crisp and loud, echoing over the harsh wheeze of Kou's breathing. She raises the chair higher, feeling pathetic and powerless.

The foreigner stops just in front of her. Their toes are almost touching. She can't move.

"You ever heard of shotgunning?" The man asks.

"Huh," says Kou.

He leans forward, and blows a stream of the golden smoke directly into her face. The taste of woodsmoke is so overbearing she coughs on it, and there's a strangely acidic edge to it that feels different than burning tree bark. Heat explodes over her face, and trails down her entire body in a shiver that feels like a blaze.

The foreigner leans back and takes a suck of his pipe. He looks down his nose at her like an especially cruel child examining an ant they're torturing. Kou's eyes are watering again, though she think it might be from the smoke, this time.

" _Wha—"_

* * *

 **o**

* * *

 **Black.**

* * *

 **o**

* * *

Her hand hurts.

Kou blinks once, twice. Her vision isn't swimming anymore. She's not cold anymore. She feels energized, powerful, ready to go, but also, her hand hurts.

Slowly, she slides her gaze from the buttons of the foreigner's coat to her hand. There's something metal gleaming between her fingers. She parts to reveal something like a spearhead attached to a thick metal cord, the big kind used to hold up construction loads. She turns her whole body as her eyes follow the cord, turning, turning, all the way to their source.

"Okumura…kun?"

The flashlight has been discarded at his feet, where it shines over the cord extending from the sleeve of his ill-fitting coat, casting huge, severe shadows over the hallway. He flicks his arm, and the spearhead snaps out of Kou's hand to snake back to his.

She slowly touches the bump on her neck. "…You…? Okumura…?"

"Golly. That smoke looks interesting," Okumura says. His face and voice are both carefully flat, beyond the eternally furrowed brow. He seems nervous.

"Why is there a hitman in your school? This isn't exactly how I wanted us to meet," muses the foreigner.

Kou whips around to boggle at him. _"What?"_

"I suppose the first few months of middle school is a prime infiltration period, isn't it?" The man exhales a puff of that strange glowing smoke. "What do you want with Sawada Kou?"

"That's it, isn't it? An _Aura_. You're from the mafia, aren't you?" Okumura asks, still blank.

" _WHAT?"_ Kou shrieks. She drops the chair entirely and flings herself at the wall, out of both of their immediate ranges.

"Asked you a question. Awful rude of you not to answer."

Okumura draws himself up. "When you're a Blackmarket operation, it's like a hobby without a community to help you. You have _generations_ of technology and power to help you. I got a tip that if I wanted information, I could use her. That's all."

Kou drags her nails down her face. What is _happening_.

"Hm. I was worried about that. Who's your source?"

"I don't know."

The foreigner wiggles the pipe in his mouth, before taking a deep, sucking drag that makes the smoke vanish entirely. When he exhales, a cloud of yellow erupts from his mouth, with the sparks gleaming like embers. He looks like a dragon, Kou thinks. A Western dragon ready to slaughter one unlucky knight.

"Well, it wasn't very smart of you to try. Why don't you go kidnap some other family heir?"

"You're right. I don't really need to bother Sawada Kou anymore." Okumura turns as if to leave.

Then there's a blur of silver, like a thrown spear, shooting across the hall, right past Kou, aimed directly at the foreigner.

The foreigner bats it away with a careless flick of his walking stick. Another spear-line is thrown, and he bats that too, then another, and then, when there's two at once, he dodges one, bats away the other, and snakes his ankle around the still-moving line with an effortless twirl of his ankle. He yanks his leg back, giving the line an awkward slack where it comes out of Okumura's sleeve. The other spearheads have already been returned, though, and when Okumura extends his arms, _six_ shoot out.

Kou lets out a garbled shriek and falls back into the classroom, but the foreigner doesn't appear to find this too alarming. He bats away two at the same time with his staff, throws off the trajectory of another with a well-timed kick, dodges another two with casual tilts out of the way, and the last—

His cane transforms into a gun and he shoots it out of the air.

Kou gapes. That can't be what happened. That _cannot_ be what happened, everything moved so fast, it had to be a trick of the eye, but there's a green pistol in his hand, and the walking stick is nowhere to be seen. He fired it with one hand, too, and doesn't show any signs of kickback. Hell, he didn't even _need_ to use one hand; his other hand is completely free.

"You're not the first person I've met to use this fighting style," he says in a light, teasing voice, "and you're certainly not the best."

"Not a lot of trainers for people like me," Okumura grits from somewhere out of Kou's line of sight.

"This isn't going to end well for you."

Silence. Kou slowly gets to her feet, afraid of being caught by the foreigner's peripheral vision, but he doesn't seem to care what she's doing. She's…she's being fought over by two criminals, two dangerous criminals with these absurd weapons, and she's terrified, but she's completely _clear-headed_ now, which is a start. She looks around the classroom, and decides to get out of the foreigner's field of vision first. She tip-toes across the classroom, and flinches at the sound of Okumura attacking again.

Well…Well, her original plan still holds. Get out of the school, right?

Kou goes to the far window and releases the latch as quietly as she can manage. It's probably not necessary, with the racket the fight is making, but something is really unsettling about the both of them, and she has no idea how aware of her they really are. Okumura may have switched targets to the foreigner, but _still_.

She throws open the window, hops out, and closes it behind her. She's at the back of the school, but there's no reason to hop any fences, with the two of them occupied, so she takes off towards the school entrance. It's nothing like before, when she was running through the halls; her balance is perfect, her body feels sturdy and stable, and there's a strange heat blazing just under her skin that burns against the cool night air.

Kou escapes the school grounds to the quiet _pop pop pop_ of gunshots and distant clanging metal. She keeps running down the street, too scared to try to go through her usual route, where she'd be isolated by resident walls. Instead, she powers right into the heart of the Downtown area, with bright lights and busy stores. Well, busy restaurants. The stores are mostly closed at this hour.

She dives onto main street and finally stops to catch her breath. Except…she's not out of breath. She feels fine. She feels like she could clear four kilometres without a problem, right now. Her hands are hot and sweaty.

The smoke. Smoke doesn't give off _light_. It must be laced with something that's highly flammable and capable of doping someone up. If he decided she needed doping up, he might be on her side, but what kind of adult dopes a kid up with a breath of pipesmoke? She _hopes_ he's on her side. She can't imagine how strong the foreigner must be, smoking that stuff straight and exhaling it like some golden dragon. Crazy.

Kou keeps a strong pace, cutting through the crowds, looking for somewhere populated to hide. A nearby display tells her it's 11:30. Most people are in bed, now, and the most busy places at this hour are bars. She could go to an internet cafe, but those are the very definition of isolated. Kou chews her lip, looking around for the most public possible place to hide in.

That place turns out to be a Macdonald's. She orders large fries and curls up into a booth seat, out of sight of the windows, and closes her eyes.

…Did Okumura seriously say _mafia?_

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

It's five in the morning when Kou finally gets back home.

She's had hours to try to parse what happened, but in the end, she really can't. Everything from the absurdity of a guy shooting spear-whips out of his sleeves to a shapeshifting gunstick just refuses to compute. Even the more basic facts, like who they are, is giving her some trouble; why would a hitman drug her and leave her on the roof? Why would a mafia man protect her? Was he protecting her, or is he some sort of rival?

Still. She can't hide forever. So she goes home.

"I'm back!" She calls out.

There's a sting of anxiety when there's no answer, but then her mom pokes her head into the hall. "Kou-chan! I was worried about you!"

"S-Sorry, mom. I, uhm…"

"Tell me next time you're gone overnight!" Her mom pulls her into a tight hug.

"I'll…do that?"

"Oh well. You have good timing!" She takes Kou by the shoulders and guides her to the sitting room so quickly Kou barely has time to take off her shoes.

"Good timing for what, exactly—"

It's the guy.

 _It_ _'s the guy._

The sleazy-looking fedora guy is sitting at their table, drinking a cup of coffee, with a newspaper spread out in front of him. He's not wearing his fedora, revealing hair that has never seen a hairbrush but is clearly well-acquainted with hair gel. It looks like someone doused their hand in mousse and took a fistful of it. It's got to be almost shoulder-length, but it's all sticking up, and it disgusts her; even Mochida would be horrified.

The pipe from before is nowhere to be seen. He's wearing silk gloves instead of white leather, now, and he's got his shirtsleeves rolled up, revealing that they're more than a stylistic choice; there's yellowed scars peaking out from the fabric, like nicotine-stained lichtenberg figures. He follows her line of sight, and his mouth tilts up, as if to say _'keep staring, and you'll get a great point of view as I shove my fist down your throat'_.

" _Who?"_ Kou barely manages to wheeze.

"This is Neophytos Von Brant, your new home tutor!" Her mom dances over to Reborn and places her hands on his shoulders. "You can call him Reborn."

"What? Why? That's not his name?"

'Reborn' takes a long sip from his coffee and smiles at her with his teeth bared. "You can call me Reborn."

Kou flinches back.

"Reborn-san has plenty of credentials. He used to be a math professor, isn't that wonderful? He's sure to get your grades up!" Her mom cheers, seemingly oblivious to the threat in Reborn's uncomfortably defined canines.

"That's… _great,_ mom." Kou squeaks.

"Reborn told me you were staying over with Kensuke-kun," her mom continues with fluttery hands, "it's nice you still get along, but the neighbours ought to be getting suspicious by now, haha!"

Kou raises her eyebrows pointedly at Reborn. Reborn raises his eyebrows right back at her, with his eyes lidded in haughty disinterest. Kou wants to punch him.

"Anyway, I'm going to finish breakfast. Why don't you review your curriculum?"

"…Will do, mom!" Kou grits.

Her mom leaves them alone. Kou waits until she can hear her mom at work in the kitchen before she starts circling the table, glaring daggers at the man.

"Who are you? Are you in the mafia?" Kou whispers.

"Sit down," Reborn orders.

"No?" Kou flattens herself against the wall.

Reborn rolls his eyes and holds a limp wrist up to his hair. To Kou's alarm, a small green lizard-creature slips out of that bramble of hair gel and nightmares and onto the back of his hand. It looks like a skink with buggy chameleon eyes. He lowers the lizard-laden hand so it's extended over the table. There's a moment of hesitation there, and Kou thinks he might be presenting the lizard to her, but then his wrist quirks in a fluid movement, and the lizard convulses.

And then the lizard turns into a gun.

Kou slaps her hand over her mouth to muffle her scream, and slides down to the ground in horror.

"Sit down," Reborn repeats.

Kou scrambles on her hands and knees to the table and sits there, staring at the…the…the lizardgun. Is that what his walking stick was made out of?

Reborn pulls the gun back. It turns back into a lizard and jumps onto his shoulder. He leans forward on the table with his arms tucked under his chest and his head quirked. "I am in the mafia."

Kou shrinks.

"But I'm not in Namimori for criminal reasons. Technically." He takes a sip of his coffee with a lackadaisical attitude that sets Kou's nerves on end. "That hitman's little 'tip' is the exact reason I'm here, actually. Somehow, it got out that you're a person of interest. I was sent by your father to keep you and your mother alive while everyone does crisis management. I'm effectively your bodyguard for the next year."

"My…father?" Kou's back straightens. "But…he does on-site construction work. Drilling! Traffic! Whatever else you do at big rig places! How is he hiring a mafia?"

Reborn's eyebrows shoot up, and then settle down crookedly. Kou is starting to hate those eyebrows. They are the most punchable part about him. "Your father is absurdly skilled at getting a truly exceptional amount of people to owe him favours. The people who he's worried are coming after you — justly so, considering last night — are doing so because they want to exchange you for those favours."

"Then…Okumura-kun wanted me as a hostage…?"

"You're lucky the brat's a complete incompetent. It seems he didn't trust his abilities enough to remove you from the school while there were still students present, and overshot the abduction time. If you're lucky, they're all going to be blithering wastes of space."

Kou bows her head. She feels sick with anxiety. "…What happened to him? Okumura-kun, I mean."

"Ran off. Not skilled or confident enough to attack you in a public place, so as long as I'm here, he's not going to bother going after you. Granted of course…" He folds his hands neatly on the table and gives her another one of those toothy smiles. "…You're a good student who won't run off by herself. Right?"

She leans back. There's sweat beading on the back of her neck. She feels she's being leered at by a carnivore, an apex predator.

A dragon.

"…Of course."

Reborn suddenly jerks back, so fast it startles her, and claps his hands together. "Excellent! Now, let's talk about your grades. I've heard they're terrible."

Kou groans and lets her head collide with the table. Whatever the heck is going on, it all leads back to one thing.

 _She_ _'s now in hell._

* * *

 **AN:**

End of Episode 1...

Surprise! The plot/concept is totally different too! I am drunk with power!

The original series really suffered from the lack of reasonable buildup in its first arc, where nothing suggests a battle manga (presumably because it was never meant to be one), and "you're going to be a mafia boss" locks the characters into one set goal and end result; the entire joke is that Tsuna is being railroaded. For Koufic, the point is that Kou has a really complex relationship with the Underworld & the Blackmarket, and being railroaded completely destroys any semblance of meaning in that conflict. Also I want it to be a battle manga. I love battle manga.

See you next time, in...

 **Episode 2: That Guy From Italy**  
Kou's new tutor is a demon insistent on interfering in her personal life, and it seems Okumura Kenta isn't done with her yet. Between her ever-failing relationship with Kensuke, her superpowered bodyguard, and the looming threat of being Kidnapper's Most Wanted, can she catch a break?


	3. That Guy From Italy (Side A)

**content warning:** Blood, needles, gore, more blood, Extreme Blood Action, bloody blood blood: the bloodening

* * *

 **EPISODE 2**

 **That Guy From Italy (Side A)**

* * *

Kou drifts gently into wakefulness with the birds singing and the sun streaming in through her window.

She blinks at a familiar ceiling, and lets her mind piece itself together. She has to get ready for school, yeah…and catch up, because she missed yesterday. And she missed yesterday…because…

She sits up with a start. Because a man with a shapeshifting gun lizard and doping tobacco has taken up residence in her home to protect her and her mother from wayward hitmen. Wayward hitmen like Okumura-kun, the most useless kid in her class, who had been sitting behind her for months. And now that man has decided to also do work as her personal tutor. Her home tutor. Her personal live-in home tutor.

 _He lives here now._

She runs a hand over her face. A few things aren't quite adding up (like the lizard), but is it okay if she just leaves things to Reborn and her dad, for now? Reborn seems competent enough, and…well, she hasn't seen her dad in a couple of years, and her impression of him begins and ends with the words 'useless' and 'drunk'. Since going home is a vanishingly rare downtime period for him, he mostly gets wasted and passes out in the sitting room for the first three days before trying to make Kou do manly activities like fishing, and outdoorsmanship. They got lost in the woods once. It was horrible.

Her dad taking advantage of people significantly more useful than he is makes sense, though. He has a pretty gravitational personality; hell, if he didn't, he and her mom would have gotten a divorce by now. Everything he does is automatically awesome. It's just that when he's home, he's not doing any of those awesome things. So all Kou gets is a drunk layabout who barely knows anything about his own kid.

Kou itches her arm irritably. Well…time to start the day. It can't be that bad, right? Okumura-kun got that tip _months_ ago, in at _least_ May, and she hadn't had any attempts on her life. Reborn is probably here as a precautionary measure, and she can probably? Treat him like a regular — if extremely terrifying — tutor. He'll only be here for a year, after all.

She pads to the bathroom, looking around warily. Even without the mafia thing, it's awkward having a guy in the house after so many years.

There's no sign of Reborn. Since she's a little slow-paced today and is no longer comfortable being naked in her own home, she decides to skip the shower for after-school (or maybe she can borrow the gym showers during lunch break?) and go right on to brushing her hair and teeth. The house has its usual quiet ambiance this morning, which strikes her as somewhat suspicious.

She's in the middle of smoothing an estrogen patch onto the fatty part of her arm when her suspicions are indirectly confirmed. Not by a particular event, but just by staring in the mirror too long. She catches something unusual at the corner of her eye.

The Sawada household's main plumbing rooms are fairly straight-forward, with the toilet on the first floor, and the bathroom on the second. That sort of setup is only natural for a house this nice. The sinks and the bath itself are separated by a foggy glass sliding-door, so someone bathing can enjoy their privacy if someone else in the house needs to brush their teeth or something. Since it's just her and her mom here, and their routines rarely intermingle like that, it's always open.

Right now, though, it's closed.

Kou stares at it.

Logically speaking, you'd think Reborn's taking a bath right now, right? Obviously he'd keep it closed to respect the privacy of the ladies of the house. That's only common sense. She takes showers every morning because she's under time constraints, but Reborn's free to have a bath in peace and relative quiet. New person moves in, door closes for the first time in forever, that conclusion is pretty obvious.

But she had already acknowledged that the door was closed when she first walked in. That isn't what caught her eye.

What caught her eye is the splash of crimson clinging to the edges of the door.

Cold sweat clings to her hairline. It can't be…Reborn is pretty impressive. He kicked a spear whip while simultaneously knocking away two other spear whips with a walking stick. That's pretty badass. Someone like that…couldn't be…

Slowly, with trembling hands, she reaches out and catches the handle. She's not sure how to go about this. If she hides behind the door?

Or, well, whatever.

Kou steps to the side and swings the door open.

Nothing happens.

She swallows and inches to the edge of the door to peek into the bathing area.

It's blood.

The red on the door could be anything, but with the pale surface and how it looks when it mixes with the water, that's definitely blood. She's gotten enough nosebleeds and petty scratches to be able to tell. There's a thin trail of splatters all over the floor, from the door all the way to the bathtub. Their tub is traditional, and meant for soaking in, so she can't see inside from here, but the smear of blood along the lip tells her everything she needs to know about what's inside.

Kou takes a few steps back and scrambles for a weapon of some kind. Finding none in the bathroom, she grabs her carving knife from her bedroom. It is basically a handle with a little blade only 2/3 the size of her thumb, but she keeps it sharp to make carving go by easier. With her weapon in hand, she tip-toes back to the bathroom and peeks past the door again.

No change.

Kou swallows thickly. Then…

She slowly moves over the blood-splattered tiles, knife raised in both hands. With each step, she can see more of the dark shape that's clearly laying in the bathtub. She swallows again and fights back the icy shiver of fear threatening to sweep through her. The person in there is likely already dead, right?

She squeezes her eyes shut and rushes forward the last few steps and raises the knife higher. When she opens her eyes…

It's Reborn. Lying in the tub face-up, his skin a chilling expanse of corpse-like grey waxiness, mottled by the blood that's caked over his entire body. Bright red, mostly wet, splattering from his lips all over his front, soaking his pajamas, everywhere. Strange scars stretch out from over his heart to crawl across his impressively muscular torso and up his neck, like creeping vines. He's laying limply in a pool of his own blood. More blood than any human can survive losing.

The knife slips from her hands to fall loudly at her bare feet. Kou's tolerance shatters.

" _ **HIIIIIIIYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"**_

Reborn jerks awake with a start and looks around the bathroom wildly.

"Who's dying!" He gargles thickly, and then he bows over with a severe, rib-shattering cough usually associated with the plague. A fat glob of blood comes flying out of his mouth to land on his pajama bottoms. He wrinkles his nose at it, and then squints at Kou.

"Oh, you. Get out of here, I'm taking a shower. Show some decency." He waves her away like she's nothing more than a pesky fly and tries to stand. The drain makes a thick sucking noise as his pajamas part from it, and the blood starts draining away. Reborn leans against the wall and grimaces at the red liquid pooled at his feet.

"…Well, that can't be good."

He pauses, and has another violent coughing fit that adds even more blood to the bath.

Kou collapses to her knees. The fact she didn't black out may be her proudest moment as a teenager so far.

"Is breakfast ready?"

So is the fact she didn't start bawling.

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

"Uhm…Reborn-san…" Kou crab-walks sideways, hands raised, at Reborn's side all the way down the stairs. "About, maybe, the hospital…"

"Don't worry. I brought my own blood packs."

" _That's not quite the problem?"_ Though it's certainly reassuring.

"Nana-san, what's for breakfast?" Reborn calls as he parades into the kitchen. Kou shoots a wary look at her mother. Reborn somehow managed to survive taking his shower and getting dressed, but he keeps spacing out and nodding off, as someone who just lost _two litres of blood_ may be wont to do. His skin is still grey, and the prim suit he's wearing only just barely covers the new scars crawling up his neck.

He seems to be injured, too, though Kou has yet to see a wound; he's walking at a stilted hobble, almost a limp, with his entire left side held far too rigidly. Kind of like a injured chest. Or hip? Something like that. She's been hovering around him just in case he topples over. (Except for when he was getting undressed and changing clothes. For decency's sake.)

"Today is omurice!" Her mom twirls around to beam at Reborn. Naturally, she notices how close he is to death pretty much immediately. "Oh, are you alright? You're looking peaky this morning. Is it the flu?"

"I'm certainly expelling a lot of fluids," Reborn croaks. His smooth baritone is thin and full of cracks from throat strain, but there's something bubbly to it, like he's been swallowing mucus.

"Don't die, Reborn-san!" Kou wails, doing her best to help him into his seat at the table.

"Don't kill me off so easily," he replies, smacking her hands away with a casual flick of the wrist. Kou flinches back, but she can't help but wring her hands fretfully just outside of his range. While she's worried about a person dying in front of her, twice as worrisome is that Reborn is currently both the only person who knows about and is willing to protect her from _hitmen_ , and the only person linked to whatever the hell her dad is up to. (Which is hopefully not Crime.)

Kou's mom serves the table, and Kou pulls her dotera tight around her shoulders and slips into her seat, staring at Reborn all the while.

"Isn't it nice having breakfast together?" Kou's mom coos, waving her chopsticks to and fro. "Reborn-san was so busy with your curriculum all of yesterday!"

"He was holed up in his room doing something suspicious." Kou narrows her eyes at him. "Like dying, maybe."

"I told you not to kill me off." Reborn flicks a wad of rice at her. It lands in her hair. Kou's expression darkens.

"Are…are you used to being ill, Reborn-san?" Kou's mom asks nervously.

"Ah, yes. I actually—" Reborn jerks, and his whole body shivers. Kou jumps to her feet instantly. Reborn gives her a whithering look and holds up a hand to stop her, while raising his other hand to his hair. Out comes that damn lizard. The halting hand turns into a finger signaling 'one moment, please'.

And then, before their eyes, the lizard turns into a bowl, with its massive, unnaturally squishy face stretched across the front. Reborn holds it up in front of him, jerks twice like a cat coughing up a hairball, and lets out a cough so deep it makes Kou's own lungs ache.

A glob of blood goes flying into the lizard-bowl.

"Finally. Been trying to get that bit out all morning," Reborn says brightly, and yes, his voice isn't bubbling anymore. He mops up the blood seeping from his mouth with a napkin like he's dabbing away pasta sauce. Kou's own mouth hangs open in horror.

" _REBORN-SAN?"_ Kou's mom cries, jumping to her feet too.

"My apologies. That was rude of me. Not exactly behaviour for the dining table, is it?"

" _REBORN-SAAAAN! PLEASE GO TO A HOSPITAL!"_ Kou shrieks.

"Your concern is precious." He tosses the blood-splattered lizard-bowl in the air, and it transforms back into a lizard.

And then the _lizard_ vomits blood.

Or, the lizard vomits something hard and small and dark. Reborn catches it and inspects it in the morning sunlight. It's a dark red bullet, streaked in what looks like gold dust.

"Ah, Leon, the proportion is too high. You're not eating enough," Reborn croons, stroking the lizard's head. The lizard shows no sign of understanding him, because it is a lizard.

"W-What…" Kou holds her hands to her mouth.

"I've had this condition for quite a while." Reborn reaches into the inner pocket of his vest and retrieves the pipe, retracted and flattened. He extends the pieces and stuffs the bullet into the chamber. Kou is entranced. "Every night, my lung tissue gets irritated and peels open. It sticks to the walls of my lungs rather than pools, so there's not much chance of suffocation or drowning, but it causes trouble in the morning. Though it's a little more extreme today."

" _YOU THINK?"_

"The air quality is too different, so the cells went into shock, it'll settle within an hour. After I'm feeling better, I'll get on that blood transfusion." He takes out a matchbook and strikes up a flame with a simple, practiced movement. While he can't light something as long as his pipe in the seductive, cradling way that seems to suit his image, Reborn somehow manages to make it look suave by holding the pipe upright with his thumb and forefinger and quirking his pinky slightly as he brings the match to the pipe's chamber. It's like he's constantly assuming he's in some sort of atmospheric vintage noir film. Kou has never met a human being with such a strongly cultivated image.

And then out wafts that strange glittering gold smoke he had blown in her face the night before.

"Oh, it…makes medicine. How nice," Kou's mom remarks. Her efforts to comprehend the situation are truly herculean.

"I apologize for smoking in the house, but since this isn't tobacco, it's fine, isn't it?" Reborn smiles peacefully, like the answer is obvious.

Well it is. He just coughed up a fat glob of blood into a shapeshifting lizardbowl. If he said tapdancing on the counters was the way to recovery, they'd buy him plated shoes. Kou's mom has no choice but to nod slowly and sink back into her seat.

Both mother and daughter watch in distant, shellshocked fascination as, with each inhale of his lizardbullet glowsmoke, his scars light up in gold. There's only the slightest trace of it peeking over his collar, but it's incredibly unsettling to look at, and it makes her wonder about the scars she remembers seeing around the edges of his gloves. It also makes her wonder how deep they actually go.

After a beat or two of silence, Kou puts two and two together.

"…Those scars. They don't just show up on the outside of your body. That's what's inside your lungs?"

Reborn looks at her coolly in the corner of his eye. "That's right."

"…How horrible…"

Reborn just smirks. "Well, I've gotten used to it. There was initially some worry about how it heals, but it seems the cells are unaffected."

That…doesn't sound like the behaviour of _any_ sort of tissue damage. Kou would know; she basically lives in infirmaries. Wounds heal by cells duplicating and filling up the gap, but the way he talks about it, it's like he's saying they just came undone, and only need to be glued back together again. No human body works like that. Right? _Right?_

…But his lizard can shape-shift. So she'll ignore that, for now. In fact, she'll just excuse any bullshit Reborn throws at her with "magic, probably". He has yet to give a scientific explanation for his lizard. He has yet to even comment on the lizard. Kou isn't even sure if he understands shapeshifting lizards aren't a thing that logically exists. It's best to just avoid the subject, for now, right? Right!

She picks at her omurice, but her appetite has been decimated. Heck, she's been so frazzled she hasn't even changed out of her pajamas yet. She won't have time to relax on the roof, but considering what happened last time, she doesn't think she wants to. In the future, she'll have to find a good classroom where the sunlight hits just right…

"By the way."

Both mother and daughter nearly jump a foot in the air.

"Could I get a cappuccino?" Reborn smirks again. It's very punchable.

"Y-Yes, of course!" Kou's mom bounces up. The relief of being able to keep busy is practically radiating from her every pore. Her mom _hates_ being idle when she's stressed.

Kou has no such anxiety, so she really doesn't enjoy the way Reborn's considering eyes slide over to her. "And can I get those blood packs? I don't want to pass out at the table. I'm not so bereft of manners, after all."

"Blood packs." Kou blinks.

"In the black box under my bed."

"You have a bed." It's been like…a day. Kou had been home all of that day. There were no trucks.

"I always set up quickly. Hurry now." Reborn waves her off.

Kou grudgingly gets to her feet and heads upstairs. Reborn now lives in the guest bedroom, which is situated right next to her own bedroom. She hadn't heard much coming out of it yesterday, but clearly he was busy, because there is, in fact, a bed — complete with headboard — sitting against the far wall, in the corner. The rest of the room is spartan, with a desk with Kou's old test papers spread across them, and two suitcases that have yet to be unpacked against the wall.

Kou gets on her knees and reaches under the bed. There's already a bunch of crap under here, like a…

Kou pulls out a sniper rifle.

Kou slowly pushes the sniper rifle back under the bed.

Her hands swat around until she finds something vaguely box-like. She grabs it and shuffles as far away from the bed as she can get, which is underneath the work desk. She knew that Reborn would have to be packing heat, if he's both a mafia man and a bodyguard, but the reminder is…unfortunate, to say the least.

The box is a glossy black, so Kou can only assume she found the right one. It's rectangular, and heavy, as a box filled to the brim with blood packs might be, with little indents on the sides for ease of carrying. The lid is lined in gold and…

In the centre of the lid is a circle of seven dragons all eating each other's tails, like a multi-part ouroboros. They're all inlaid silver, except for the gold dragon at the top of the arc. Kou runs her fingers over it, feeling the rough raised scales, and the tiny details of the teeth. It's beautiful work, and strangely formal for its use.

Her fingers trail down, over the identical silver dragons. There's something alluring about them, a ring of serpents, locked in an eternal circle. It's like an omamori, she decides. Not the charms you buy at shrines, or the kind Mochida got from some girl, but a talisman. Something precious.

Her fingers move counter-clockwise along the dragons, and when they reach the last, the thing burns _hot,_ making Kou yelp and yank her hands back from the metal. She stares as the metal glows orange, before dying out again.

" _STOP TOUCHING THE DRAGONS,"_ Reborn's muffled voice hollers from downstairs.

"I'M NOT," Kou yells back nervously.

She hesitates, and tries it again, clockwise this time. When her fingers near the silver dragon being eaten by the gold dragon, it radiates orange. Not heat, though it burns a little when she presses her finger on its edges. Just…stinging orange.

"That's magic," she mumbles. "…What's a mafia guy doing with magic…?"

The gears turn in her head, as she recalls everything related to magic he's done so far. They've hardly interacted, but even in that fight with Okumura-kun…

"…That lizard," she realizes.

There's something she's missing out on, and she doesn't like it.

Right, blood. She sighs and opens the box. A blast of cool air hits her, and she squints at the _solid gold inlaid centre_. This guy wants his blood stashed away in _style_. There's only six bags in here, and all of them have the weird glittery look the bullet the lizard coughed up did. She takes two packs out and inspects them. Some sort of medicated blood? Did the lizard make this stuff?

She crawls back out from under the desk and nudges the box back under his bed with her foot. Then, because the magic dragon business has made her suspicious and she probably won't have an opportunity to poke around in his room after this, she starts digging through his desk.

All the drawers have textbooks and paper in them. The guy sure is dedicated to the tutor cover. She pulls out one of her old notebooks and skims through it. He's marked it to hell and back in red pen, and the fact he made the effort is somehow comforting to her. She kept decent notes, but not thorough ones, and Reborn added extra context where she might have forgotten details. The efforts extend to her social studies and Japanese classes as well.

Kou snaps the book shut and replaces it. As for the stuff still on the desk, more of the same. Reborn figured out where her misconceptions came from and carefully noted how she should have thought about the problem. This is on a level waaaay above corrections, and not even on just her math stuff.

Awful lot of work for a bodyguard. Awful lot of work for a scummy criminal.

Kou sits the blood packs in the crook of her arm and chews her lip. She's missing out on something, but she doesn't think she's being lied to.

" _NOSY,"_ Reborn shouts, making her jump.

Kou scutters downstairs and places the blood packs gently down on the table in front of Reborn. "…Are you going to use the lizard for the drip?"

"Astute," Reborn hums. The lizard does, indeed, turn into a green needle and tube. Reborn attaches it to the first pack and rolls up his sleeve. To Kou's discomfort, the yellow scars that she saw peeking over his gloves are now extended all the way up his arm. It doesn't _look_ like it's parted tissue, close up. There's no bruising or darkened pores, and no break in his skin. Maybe the inside of his lungs are bleeding because they're more delicate.

"Does that hurt?" She asks hesitantly.

"Burns in the morning," he says, and inserts the needle into a little pock mark in the crook of his elbow.

Kou's mom wanders to her daughter's side with Reborn's cappuccino, and reaches to give the beverage to him. She's more skittish than Kou has ever seen her.

Kou decides to help. "Is…I'm sorry, but is that a dragon?"

Reborn glances at her. Her mouth tightens.

"How you manage to get the grades you do with a mind like that is beyond me," he states airily. It's definitely a compliment, but it's said like an insult.

"A…magical dragon."

"Clearly."

"Aren't you, uh, mixing genres a little bit, there?"

"When you think of people most likely to own exotic pets, the rich and the criminal are the first things to come to mind, are they not?"

" _There's no such thing as magical dragons, though?"_

"Of course there is. I'm using one as a drip."

Hard to argue with.

Kou's mom takes the opportunity to guide Kou into the sitting room, maybe to keep her from starting a fight. She's in a pretty accusatory mood, right now. When they're a suitable enough distance away, she bows over to whisper to her. "Kou-chan, can you leave him be? I don't think he's trying to start any trouble. I thought he might be that suspicious character you told me about, so I talked to your father about it. Apparently, Reborn-san is a brother of his employer's, so you shouldn't worry too much."

"Criminal dragon-tamer _nepotism_?"

"I wonder if Iemitsu tames dragons," her mom says thoughtfully, but she shakes the idea off and holds Kou closer. "Before we got married, your father tended to attract a lot of trouble, dear, and his boss is helping him avoid that trouble. I don't know if Reborn is a criminal, per se, but…I trust the both of them very much, and Reborn definitely needs some down time!"

"He needs some _hospital_ time."

"Well, he won't go to a hospital, so a quiet life in a small Japanese town is the next best thing." She claps her hands together. "This is all a lot stranger than I thought, but despite, uhm, the, _existence of dragons,_ can you be patient with him? He's so _sick,_ Kou-chan. He needs a place where he can rest. Some quiet desk work! It's only for a year, okay? He'll be gone by the end of winter."

Kou scowls. Her mom has been bought over completely. Playing nice with her husband's friends has now outranked Kou's hatred of those outside the law. "…I mean, if youkai are real, I'm seriously going to lose it."

"Kou-chan."

"How many cryptids are really out there, mom? Tsukinoko? Kappa? The world needs to know! Is the Loch Ness Monster a dragon too?"

Her mom rolls her eyes and squishes her face with one hand. "Go get dressed, silly."

"UMAs! UMAs!" She chants, walking backwards up the stairs.

"She better be joking," Reborn remarks right before Kou backs out of earshot.

(She sort of is. But the theoretical existence of youkai is still one more anxiety to add to the pile.)

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

Regardless of what they told her mom, Reborn is still a bodyguard, so he's now bodyguardingher to school.

"Unnecessary," she says.

He's hale and hearty now, with plenty of colour in his face, and the scars that were glowing at his neck have vanished. The limp is completely gone now. He's still smoking the pipe, and he isn't coughing anymore, so Kou no longer feels the need to hover around him with her arms outstretched just in case he topples over.

" _Ha_. The girl who got drugged because she passed out on a roof doesn't get to tell me what measures are and aren't necessary."

"I didn't know I was a target!"

"Yes you did. You said you felt stalked."

"It could have been my imagination! _You_ _'re_ not my imagination!"

"You're a buffoon and I'm not letting you out of my sight."

Kou kicks him.

Both her and her mother are targets, but Kou is a highly mobile target who has to walk through open streets to get to school, so Reborn is shadowing her and his weird-looking dragon thing — Leon, he calls it — is staying with her mom. Visitor's passes only let him hang around immediately before and after class hours. He has yet to tell her what he's doing while she's in class.

Reborn is maintaining his 'it is not strange that I have a magical dragon sidekick, my illness isn't terrifying at all' outlook, so there's not much to talk about. Kou has resorted to just being uncooperative in general.

"Are you really going to poke around my school again?"

"Superficially. I already did a sweep. Right now, the most important thing is seeing how students react to you, so we don't have a repeat of Okumura Kenta's case. Some incompetent brat who's never headed his own mission managed to insert himself, so we can expect others to have done the same."

Kou pinkens at the thought of having Reborn witness the school's reaction to her. She's kept to herself this year, but she's had her entire elementary school era and half a middle-school year to be ruined in the eyes of her peers. The reaction to her falling off the roof was proof enough.

"So I have to escort you around so you can hear people insult me?"

"Goodness, do all of them do that?" Reborn holds a hand to his cheek and raises his eyebrows teasingly. "Really making my job harder, aren't you."

Kou grits her teeth and opens her mouth to say something, and ends up biting her tongue when something hard slams down on the top of her head.

"IPPON!"

Kou dances backwards with a shocked squeak. Mochida — or Kensuke, if she wants to keep sucking up to him — is standing there, sword extended, looking irritable. Well, bag extended; he hasn't actually removed his bamboo sword. Either way, he's brandishing a weapon. He probably thinks she ditched him. He always thinks the worst of her.

"Ken-chan," Kou whispers as sweetly as possible.

Kensuke's expression sours immediately. " _None of that,_ you're still in trouble! I waited an hour for you after school! All my friends made fun of me! And then you didn't even show up the next day! My mom had to tell me you were home sick! What the hell is your problem!"

"Your mom has to tell you everything. We're not friends," Kou says.

"Is that the stalker? Did he kidnap you?" Kensuke aims his sword at Reborn, ignoring her entirely.

Reborn tilts his fedora. "My name is—"

"Neophytos Von Brant."

Reborn grabs her by the throat and shoves her behind him. "My name is _Reborn_. I'm her home tutor. You must be Mochida Kensuke."

"Yeah? What about it?" Kensuke steps back uncomfortably.

"How long have you known Sawada Kou?"

"Since we were like…babies, I guess? Our moms visit with each other, and we've always been in the same classes, but we're not friends." Kensuke rests his sword on his shoulder.

"I noticed you have frequent seating neighbour despite that?"

"How did you—"

"He was in a neighbouring class for the past two years. I think the teachers thought we must get along, before," Kou interjects quickly.

"Mmm. Which means people might be aware of your relationship," says Reborn.

Kou pales. _"We're not friends!"_

"You're associated enough that if one dies, the other will feel bad about it. Close enough."

" _Dies?"_ Kensuke squawks. Kou agrees!

"How are you at kendo?" Reborn asks him.

"I- I'm the captain of the team! The best!"

"Good. If someone tries to kill you, do your best. I'll hide the body, if it becomes necessary."

" _WHAT?"_

"He's joking! That was a joke!" Kou shrieks.

"Mm. Any other secret friends I should know about?"

" _We're not friends!"_ The both of them yell at the same time.

Reborn quirks an eyebrow and very pointedly does not comment. Kou wants to tear her hair out.

Kensuke continues to needle her and glare suspiciously at Reborn, but neither feel the need to tell him about the hitman thing. Kou because she just wants wait it out until it all blows over and Kensuke will disrupt that tenuous peace, and Reborn because…he's just a bad person, she supposes. He _admitted_ to being from the _mafia_.

Or…Or did he? He sort of just rolls with anything she says, now that she thinks about it. She was the one who proposed it.

"Are you really in the mafia?" She whispers.

"Can you doubt a face like this?" Reborn grins. It's the type of flat smile worn by those who take gleeful satisfaction in not listening to anything anyone has to say. Kensuke's face takes on an expression Kou hasn't seen since he was eight years old and his friends dared him to eat a lemon raw.

"Are you ever going to tell me anything about yourself?" She pouts.

"I'd be rather bad at my job if I did. And you. Are you going to sacrifice yourself for the health and safety of Sawada Kou?" Reborn swivels to waggle his eyebrows at Kensuke.

"Wh— _no,_ I don't want anything to do with your freaky…whatever this is! Stay the hell away from me, creep! And we're not friends!" Kensuke swings the bag back over his shoulder and takes off at a run. He is very bad at running. Kou could outpace him by two laps in a race.

She waits until he's out of sight.

Then she kicks Reborn again.

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

"…Are people really going to kill me?" Kou asks. On one hand, he was clearly trying to get Kensuke to leave them alone, on the other, _aaaa, death!_

Reborn pauses in fidgeting with his visitor's pass. "Unlikely, but still possible. The main threat is someone killing you after getting what they want. Or _not_ getting what they want, as it were."

"You said Okumura-kun was a hitman."

"Hitman means different things to different people." Reborn whips out a pair of binoculars and inspects the halls in the building opposite them. "For example, in my line of work, it means hired combatant."

"That's a mercenary, isn't it?"

He pauses, and pulls the binoculars from his eyes. " _How_ are you barely passing."

"I dunno. Bad teachers, I guess." She scuffs her shoes on the ground. Her ears sting with the sudden heat.

"Well, I'll need to check in with the teachers too, so I'll investigate it. Now, how do I put this…" He folds the binoculars and puts them back into his unnecessarily fancy coat. "Mercenaries are soldiers you can buy. Hitmen are specialists you can hire on. Okumura wasn't just pathetic because he didn't know how to hold an unconscious fourteen-year-old girl hostage, he's pathetic because he has exceptional combat skill and it took him…what is it, June now? _Two and a half months_ to case out the school, and he still couldn't figure out how to get you out of it during class hours. He's bad at his specialization, thus, worthless."

"Aaaand it's been over two and a half months since people found out about my dad's family…Do you think they're all that incompetent?" Kou asks with a miserable hope.

"Of course not." Reborn wanders over to a classroom and slaps something just above the doorframe. "Namimori is a protected region, brat. The only reason I'm here is as a precaution for people skilled enough to circumvent that."

"Then Okumura-kun…?"

"Probably already lived in town when he got the message. I'll need to speak with him again to find out more." He puts another one on the next door.

Kou wanders into the classroom and peeks at what he placed. She can't see anything at first, but then…there, blending into the walls, the shape of some sort of device. She steps on her tip-toes. A tiny device, with a…mesh…?

She drops and sprints after Reborn. "Hey!"

"Any more brilliant revelations?"

" _You're bugging the school?!"_

"Of course I am. How else am I supposed to spy on your teachers?" He adds another. "I already did the upper floors, by the way."

"Isn't that illegal?"

"Extremely. I'm a criminal, in case that wasn't clear." He skips to place the next one.

"What kind of people does my dad know?"

"You heard your mother. I'm a brother of his employer."

"Yeah, but that doesn't tell me anything."

"Was it supposed to?"

Kou goes in to kick him, but he easily dances away from her flying feet. "Fall off a roof, jerk!"

"Don't be crass." He slips a hand down the small of her back and shoves her face-first into a wall with startling force. "You're making a scene."

"No, you are! I'm just reacting to all the scenes you're making! You know what's a scene? _Vomiting blood in my bathroom_."

"Coughing blood. Vomiting it would be horrifying and an entirely different health issue altogether."

" _It was a scene and I hated it!"_

Several students who were peeking curiously at the two of them jump and quickly move on, whispering as they go. Kou flushes and buries her head in her arms.

"Class will start soon. Go to your homeroom," Reborn says, softer now.

"I hate this…" Her fingers tangle in her hair. "I had a schedule, you know? I don't know how to handle changes! I can't handle new people at all! Reintroduce yourself reasonably! You can't introduce every single part of you as a surprise, it's rude and awful and I hate it!"

"You're being ridiculous."

"Well…Well so are you!"

Reborn slides a hand along the nape of her neck, grips her tight, and tosses her halfway down the hall with absurd strength. "A nice criminal who owes your father a favour has come to spend his sick leave saving you from the evil hypothetical kidnappers! Look a little happier about it."

"I'm calling my dad after school!" Kou yells after him.

Reborn ignores her to slap down another bug.

 _Vile_.


	4. That Guy From Italy (Side B)

It's been FOUR CENTURIES, APPROXIMATELY

I wasn't sure how I wanted the Mochida scene was going to go, so this festered a lot longer than it should have, but I outlined it properly two days ago and trucked right through it. And NOW IT'S DONE. I have the next chapter outlined too, so that shouldn't take literal months

Also, an older note I had pre-prepared:

It occurs to me that not everyone is omniscent of my stance on certain things and therefore might form some unfair expectations, so I want to be absolutely clear:

1\. As a survivor of childhood sexual assault who was groomed all through my teen years to find my abuse normal, the idea of an adult dating a child is abhorrent to me on every single level. I find the idea I could be somehow promoting such a relationship with my works stomach-churning, especially considering my reoccurring interest in Reborn being intimate with emotionally needy teenagers. There is no romantic or sexual relationship between any adults and any children they interact with. I wish I didn't have to say "don't ship a 14-year-old with a grown-ass adult" but here this is anyway. I don't want to hear about anyone finding my sexual abuse tantalizing in the context of your fav characters. This includes child-on-child sexuality!

2. _ **KOU IS A LESBIAN**_

* * *

 **Chapter 4**

 **That Guy From Italy** **(Side B)**

* * *

The radio hisses with feedback noise before kicking back on.

"— _Your grades aren't improving,"_ a sneering voice declares, tinny through the weak signal.

" _I'm sorry, professor."_ It's a little hard to pick out with the audio quality and the briefness of the statement, but this must be Kou.

" _You think you could be accepted into a good school like this? Your mother must be ashamed."_

No response. Creaking noise.

" _If you spent less time on reckless monkeying about and more time on studying, imagine what you could accomplish!"_

No response. Paper being slapped against a hard surface. The tittering of classmates.

Based on the number of steps before the teacher stops again, Okumura Kenta is absent. No other student receives criticism harsher than a 'disappointing'.

Reborn twirls around in his office chair to the other side of the room, where he's set up documentation on people close to Sawada Kou, and adds a note to the teacher's file. There aren't many people on his corkboard; just a few friends of Nana, all of Kou's school teachers, and that irritable acquaintance…who she knows via her mother's friend.

Farther down the board are people Reborn doesn't really need to think about, like her doctor and the clan that lives in the Hakuyou area. She doesn't seem to spend a whole lot of time forming meaningful relationships with other people, beyond keeping up with her extended family.

It is, in total, not a whole lot to work with.

The second radio starts picking up noise. Reborn kicks off the wall, twirls back to the recording equipment, and turns the dial on the machine next to the radio giving him a live feed of Nezu Dohachiro bullying middle-schoolers. The playback gives him a muddled whine. He adjusts a few dials until it can cleanly parse the sound it's picking up.

" _You don't know who he is? What kind of hitman are you?"_

"… _We don't exactly…socialize."_

" _Is that it? Or are you just too pathetic for anyone to pay attention to? Have you even killed anyone?"_

Reborn holds up a finger for each voice that isn't Okumura Kenta.

" _I don't have too— that's never been my job! I—"_

" _I've killed people. You want me to kill you?"_

" _No, I can— he has weaknesses!"_ Okumura's voice wobbles. _"He's sick. And busy trying to protect…trying to protect Sawada's kid, right? So…all we gotta do is split them."_

" _Split 'em?"_

" _We can get them both,"_ Okumura says quickly. _"You can overpower the bodyguard, and I can get the girl. He's got Aura, I've seen it, we don't even need the blackmail! It's lower-risk!"_

" _How do you suppose we'll do that?"_

Reborn leans forward in his seat, elbows perched upon his thighs, with his clasped hands held to his smirking face.

"How indeed."

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

Kou is miserable.

To be fair, she is often miserable. At school, her default mood is overwhelmingly _'blaaaahhhhh'_. She doesn't have the energy to get too invested in the callous dismissals of her peers, since the people she _really_ needs to suck up to are in Hakuyou, but being surrounded by people who think it's perfectly fine and normal to treat her like crap is obviously going to bother her anyway.

It's now bothering her a little more than usual, though, because she knows Kensuke slightly more than the rest of them, and now _he_ doesn't like her.

Well…They've never liked each other much to begin with. But now he doesn't like her because he thinks she's amassing some sort of death cult, leaving her with only _Reborn_ as the only person outside of her mom that she can actually talk to, and he's the source of the problem to begin with.

Kou has a problem with criminals. She's not scared of them, and doesn't find them reprehensible, but she just doesn't _like_ them. They make extreme decisions and tend to be unpredictable, so when she has to deal with them, she spends more time feeling terrified and small than playing up basic social decorum. If she cried in front of a _criminal_ teacher and chastised them, they'd probably waterboard her.

Criminals make her feel weak.

And miserable.

So far, Reborn's doing a bang-up job of living up to his background.

It isn't _fair_ that Kensuke is avoiding her because of some guy who's harassing her. He should be the one protecting her from the harassing. They're _childhood friends_ , sort of, well, not really, but she made a point of that when she was trying to get him to protect her, and now he should be more sensitive about her situation. He said he'd let her hang out with him and now he's so mad at her he'll probably lose it if she shows up like this, but she's out of options.

Kou peeks over the windowsill into the kendo hall. It's a little cramped in comparison to the gymnasium, but ever since the new wing of the school was built for the Judo and Boxing clubs, they've had more room to move and more time to practice, and the school's ranking has gone up.

She hasn't seen any notable difference ever since Kensuke became captain. She doesn't know enough about kendo to say if he's skilled or not; from what she's looking at right now, he seems to hit awfully hard, and doesn't have a lot of flourish. He manages to win the practice match she's watching, and from the way the rest of them react, that's common for him.

Kensuke pulls off his helmet and reclines on the side of the ring and another pair of boys step up. He chats with his clubmates while mopping up the sweat on his brow, looking like he's in a good mood. Kou leans from one leg to the other, weighing her options. She doesn't know what Kensuke's told his friends about yesterday. He might get mad at her for not saying the right thing.

Judging by how much of an asshole Kensuke is…

Kou slides in through the kendo hall's door and flattens herself against the wall, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, which is hard when you're wearing a bright orange cardigan. After a few moments, she's noticed by the boys turned her way, and Kensuke follows their gaze up to her. She winces at the dawning horror on his face.

Kensuke abruptly stands and marches over to her. He's so aggressive that Kou takes a step back, but he holds his back rigidly enough that he's probably not about to threaten her.

"What are you _doing_ here," Kensuke hisses.

"I wanted to explain without Reborn being weird," Kou wrings her hands. "I didn't blow you off, or anything…"

"You may as well have, everyone thinks I got stood up by one of the biggest losers in the school! Do you have any idea how embarrassed I was?" Kensuke jabs her painfully in the shoulder.

"I went to school and got drugged up by—" Kou hesitates. "—Uh, actually, I think Reborn _was_ the stalker? But he's here to keep _other_ stalkers away from me, but one drugged me, is the point."

Kensuke stares at her, stunned. Then he strangles the air. _"Are you crazy?"_

"No, I— My dad is—" Kou realizes that the actual problem is too unreal to satisfy someone like Kensuke, and just settles on the closest possible equivalent, "my dad is in trouble with some guys, and since no one know where he is, they're trying to harass me and my mom until he talks to them. I'm in a lot of trouble!"

"What do you want _me_ to do about it? You want to drag me into your dad's gang activity? Is your dad _in_ a gang? Do you want _me_ to join a gang?"

Kou grits her teeth. "I mean…I'd rather have you ignoring me rather than avoiding me, is all."

" _So you tell me your dad's gang wants to kill you?"_

"I think you're kind of misinterpreting—"

"Hey, she actually showed up!"

Kou takes another step back when one of Kensuke's friends throws an arm over his shoulder. He's a huge third year, and puberty was good to him, giving him a slight peach fuzz on his chin. Kensuke instantly crumples. He's a prideful person, the most prideful person Kou has ever known, and he's the _team captain_. These two have to have a tense relationship, if this guy is intimidating to him.

Which means Kensuke, as The Most Prideful, is going to let him say whatever he wants to avoid the brunt of his attentions.

"Uh, yeah…her uh…" Kensuke looks desperately at her. He knows her and was harassed by Reborn earlier, so her explanation makes sense to _him_ , but to someone unfamiliar to both of them, her situation is going to sound totally ridiculous.

Kou tries to deviate even further. "My dad's drinking buddies started following me to school yesterday. I asked M…Kensuke, for help because I thought, uh," she glances to Kensuke's alarmed expression, "I could tell somebody was following me. I just saw like five guys waiting for me and panicked."

Kensuke relaxes, and he looks up nervously to the third-year. "Dumbass can't even wait for me to escort her to school, hehe."

"Oh, man, sucks to be you. Is your family in debt or something?" The third-year leans in closer, and Kou leans back.

"No, uhm, not really…I don't know why they're coming to me…?" She should have thought of an actual explanation for this. 'Extracting his knowledge of magical powers' doesn't really have the integrity for euphemisms.

"Well, aren't you lucky you have the kendo captain for a childhood friend!" He lifts his arm off of Kensuke's shoulders and takes a step closer. Kou is flattened against the door, now. "I doubt too many people would help a brainless chick like you anyway."

"You really get off on belittling people, huh," Kou says, because 'immune to social stress' often also means 'impervious to barriers of social restraint'.

"I'm sorry?" He looms over her.

"What's the point of calling me brainless? Do you get anything from it?" She gestures to the people watching them. "It's all fun to belittle people when you're talking to your friends, but why do it to my face?"

Kou can visibly see when her assertion of social decorum fails to land. She curls up a little into the door as the third-year rests an arm over her head and leans in, shadowing her entirely.

"I'm stating _facts_ to your face because I'm having a conversation, you know? Loads of people use facts in conversations."

She clutches her bag tightly to her chest and tries to make eye contact with Kensuke, but he's looking at his other clubmates. They're laughing, like the third-year is getting in a fight, not bullying someone clearly weaker than him _who is also a girl_.

"You're stating facts while intimidating me. I'm pretty sure there's a difference," Kou mutters.

"I'm engaged in the conversation!"

It's not working. He _knows_ he's being a bad person, and he enjoys it. Social decorum is totally meaningless to him. She can't talk herself out of this. Kou tries to sidle out from under him. "I-I don't think you should be this level of engaged when you're talking to a girl you don't know."

The third-year guffaws. "Like you even count as a girl?"

Kou's stomach clenches, and tears prickle at her eyes. She tries to catch Kensuke's gaze again. He looks wide-eyed at her, then the third-year, and the corners of his mouth pull up in a sagging, trembling smile.

"…Man, just back off. If anybody thinks you're into a chicks that ugly, your reputation is going to tank."

Kou chokes as the rest of them laugh. Kensuke's eyes slide to the floor, unable to meet hers. Her hands ball into fists around her bag, and her own sense of social decorum decays when she sees the third-year turned to Kensuke, appeased, laughing too, ignoring her like she's nothing, because he's set the stage and got everything he wanted. Kensuke's supposed to be the captain.

Before any tears can fall, she grabs the third-year by the front of his uniform and knees him in the crotch.

He hits the floor to a sudden hush. When he tries to sit up again, Kou wacks him over the head with her bag. Several boys let out a shocked _'ooohhhh'_.

She sniffles and looks at Mochida directly. "And you're _scared_ of him?"

He opens his mouth to speak, but she tears open the door and storms out. He doesn't call after her, and she doesn't turn back.

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

Kou is still steaming when she gets home, so she doesn't have the patience to deal with Reborn making stir-fry with her mother in their kitchen, shaking his hips to bubbly idol group pop music.

" _Enjoying_ yourself?" She snaps.

"Immensely. Your mother is a culinary genius," says Reborn. Her mom holds a hand to her cheek and titters.

"Why don't you take those manners and give them to someone who _needs_ them?" Kou bites back. She throws her bag hard enough at the sitting room table for it to skid and storms over to the phone in the dining room. She has her dad's number memorized, because he's listed as a second emergency contact in most of her files.

"Bad day at school?" Her mom asks.

"Mochida Kensuke can swallow worms for all I care."

"Her friend," her mom explains to Reborn, who knows _damn well_ who Mochida Kensuke is.

Her dad doesn't answer the first time, or the second, or the third. She crawls under the sitting room table for privacy while also being close enough to Reborn for him to overhear her conversation, and rings until he picks up the seventh call.

"Sorry, I wasn't in," he says breathlessly. The calls must have made him run. _Good._

"Send him _back_ ," Kou snaps.

" _Tsuna?"_

"Send him back to whatever mafia hellhole you found him in!" She pauses, remembers Reborn's explanation of his background, and adds, "and make your boss un-invite him from his next family get-together!"

She hears something that sounds suspiciously like Reborn laughing, and she slams the leg of the table with her foot to show her displeasure.

"Tsuna, I _can_ _'t._ Do you know how hard it was to find someone qualified enough to protect you and your mother from something this vague?" She hears a clink of glass on the other end of the line. "If I'm getting rid of him, I'm going to have to wait until we know what's going on. What's he done?"

"He let me get _drugged_ ," Kou says loudly, "and ruined all my friendships and _doped me up with his smoke drugs_ , and made me look at him coughing up blood _all_ over our bathtub! He's clearly not qualified!"

"Well, you're alive, aren't you?"

" _Dad!"_

"I don't have an answer for you, Tsuna. Unless he actively hurts you, you're going to have to wait at least another two months. Reborn is a friend, and I trust him not to do that."

Kou crawls out from under the table and leans over it, facing the door Reborn is leaning against. She glares at him, and his knowing expression. He let her call her dad. He _knew_ what her dad would say.

"I fell off a roof, dad," Kou murmurs.

" _Really?_ How'd you get out of _that_ unscathed?" He at least has the mind to sound worried about it.

She stares at the woodgrain on the table. "…R…Reborn…"

"Oh, see? He may not be perfect, but he can still do his job. I'm not saying you aren't right, just that he's better than being kidnapped. Or…I suppose death. Did you break anything?"

"No," Kou sulks.

"Okay. That's good. Okay." Her dad takes a sip of whatever he poured for himself. "Listen, kiddo, I am juggling a _lot_ of angry people right now, who are angry about a lot of different things. My schedule is booked from 10 to 10. If there's a problem, you can call right after school, but I just don't have time otherwise."

"How many criminals do you know? Are you in a gang?"

"Of— of course not. I just know a lot of people that are hard to get a hold of, and it's making me a bit of a target."

"What about your boss? Is he connected too? Does he even know? If your family is being threatened, why can't you go on leave and _be_ here to stop it! Doesn't he even _care_?" Kou is tearing up again.

"It's…it's not that simple, kiddo. Especially right now."

"You lied to us," she sniffles.

Reborn's face is neutral.

Her dad is silent for a moment. It gives her tears time to hit the table. "I didn't want you to worry over nothing. It's never been a danger until now. Knowing is probably safer for you now, though. Sorry your old man isn't as above-board as you'd like."

"I don't…I don't care that you're not above-board." Kou's voice wobbles. "You should be home. You should be here to look after us."

"I will be, I promise. There's— we're all very confused. Reborn and I are both trying to figure out where the information on my family is coming from, and I can't leave, no matter what. But this doesn't…once it's over, you can go back to a regular life, and I so can I. I know it's a little weird to find all this out at once, and it may seem scary, but, well, I'm a little more cunning than I look." He laughs nervously, and then goes quiet again. When he speaks, it's with a nervous edge. "Hey, once I can get back, how's about you and me have a little father-son bonding time out on the lake?"

Kou's grip on the phone tightens until the plastic creaks. _"No."_

"It's…yeah, we can do whatever you want. You're a strong kid, you know that? You're practically a man already, this is—"

Kou's skin prickles, and the fact she's been actively lying to him blanks out of her mind. She gets up, hoists the phone back, and chucks it at the wall as hard as she can. Reborn watches impassively, not moving an inch, like he expected that to happen too. It infuriates her.

Kou breathes in harsh gasps. Her mother is calling after her, asking what happened. She roughly mops her damp cheeks, and fixes Reborn with a glare, daring him to comment. He doesn't, so she turns on her heel and storms upstairs, ignoring her mom. She can put two and two together.

Her half-finished bird is on her bed; Reborn was probably looking around. Kou takes the bird, chucks that at the wall too, and flops down face first. She has too much energy to just lie down there, so she wriggles up to her pillows, digs her face in, and screams until she feels like she's vented at least a little of her anger. Then she turns on her side and glares at the dent the wooden figure made in the wall. She should have thrown it harder. She should have thrown it so hard it embedded itself in the drywall.

There's a knock on her door.

"I don't want to talk about it," Kou says.

"I wouldn't expect you to." Kou jerks at the sound of Reborn's voice.

"What do _you_ want?"

"I have a rough idea of what he said to you." Reborn slides into the room. His arms are still folded, but he's holding a box in one hand. He opens his arms up to show her. It's her estrogen patches.

Kou's face goes hot, and she buries her face back in her pillow.

Reborn ignores her embarrassment. "Your father asked me to look after his wife and _son_. Your file said 'Sawada Tsunayoshi'. I was _very_ perplexed."

"Go away," Kou says wetly. Her voice creaks with the strain she put on it from screaming.

"Thankfully, I'm a responsible adult," he sits on the end of her bed, by the feet, just out of kicking range, "and I asked your mother about it."

Kou grabs a pillow and shoves it over her other ear.

"You're intersex. That's a lot of wiggle room. Hiding it from him means hiding medical records, forging at least a _few_ documents, and getting your hormone replacement under the table, complicating a process that would have been otherwise very simple. You obviously don't like it when he misgenders you, so why go through that level of effort?"

Kou pops up from her pillow sensory deprivation chamber and curls her lip into a furious sneer. "You've met him, haven't you?"

"I have." His expression is cool and reading.

"Then you know what he's like. He was _so excited_ to have a son, and he's hardly even _here_. What's one week of pretending if it means…"

"You think he's avoiding you," says Reborn. Kou curls into herself. "You think he's avoiding you, and if you being a girl makes him uncomfortable, he's going to avoid dealing with that too. And never come home."

Kou stares at her socks and wiggles her toes. Reborn's body is just beyond them, in her blurry peripheral vision. He's not moving, or reacting. Her toes clench along with her stomach. He has nothing to say, because he knows she's right. He knows her dad. He knows a lot of things. She still wants to punch him.

"Well." Reborn gets up and stands next to her. She refuses to look up at him. "I've been on protection detail often enough to know a miserable charge is an unmanageable one. What _shall_ we do about that?"

"Nothing. Go away." She flops back down and turns to face the wall.

"Do you have a party dress?"

She blinks and turns back to look at him. He's already halfway to her closet. "Huh?"

"A party dress. Something you'd wear to a nice restaurant."

"I don't…I don't go to nice restaurants," she mutters.

"I'm sure your mother forces you to socialize at _some_ sort of gathering, she's very pushy." He sorts through her clothes-rack, and stops at a piece of clothing she can't see. She sits up again to see better. Reborn pulls out a pastel pink dress with lace sleeves and frilly edges. "This will work."

"I'm not wearing that in public," Kou whines.

"Why not?"

"It'll look stupid on me." Tears bubble up again. She wishes they would stop. "It's too…"

"Too what? Girly?" He strides over and holds it up to her. "What's wrong with that?"

Kou stares at the gleaming pink of the taffeta skirts, and her lips tremble.

Reborn lowers the dress and uses the hook of the hanger to lift her chin up. She looks at his widow's peak instead of his face.

"You're a girl, aren't you?"

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

"I look stupid."

" _Everyone_ looks stupid in a frilly pink taffeta party dress."

"Well I look stupider. I'm going home."

"I didn't spend an hour fitting that dress to you and teaching your mother how to do a flat seam so you could go home and hide in your pajamas, young lady."

Kou shuffles on the street corner, avoiding the gaze of the people walking past. She isn't sure if she wants the walking sign to light up so she can hurry past, or for it to take even longer so she has time to convince Reborn that this was a bad idea.

"I want to go out with mom," Kou tries.

"Can't. She's teaching her friends to flat seam."

"You planned this."

"I did not. You will find that I reserved a table for three when we arrive."

"You reserved a table!"

"I planned some things."

Kou folds her arms and huffs. Reborn had redid the band around her stomach and the shoulders so the dress fit her better, and cut the wrist seams open so they'd flare out instead of balloon in a hideous 80s-era heap of sagging lacy fabric, but Kou doubts it really did much. Reborn also did her makeup. Why does Reborn even know how to do someone's makeup?

Her mom did her hair, so at least there's _one_ thing Reborn is bad at.

Reborn is, of course, effortlessly good-looking. He just threw on a suit and put a hat on and he's automatically gorgeous. The beautiful can never understand the ugly. A little facepaint and a smoother silhouette isn't going to make her look less gross, just like a haircut and a promotion to team captain didn't make Mochida less of an asshole.

The walking sign lights up. Reborn presses a glove hand to the small of her back to push her forward. She stands up straight and storms across the street. At least he didn't make her wear heels. The shiny red flats are a lot comfier than the dress.

The restaurant he picked out is so fancy it has its own decorative garden out front, with those tall pointy hedge bushes and everything. The lettering on the front is in curving gold roman letters, and the place is painted a rich, dark red that oozes luxury. Reborn pushes her in before she can read the katakana below the sign, and she nervously tip-toes over the wine-red carpet. Past the front entrance, it's soft and sinks under her soles.

"Five o'clock, table for three, Von Brant, not expecting our third," Reborn says to the maître d'hôtel.

"Of course, sir. Right this way."

The maître d' guides them past the main dining areas, where people don't look up from their tables, all the way to an area in the back hidden by wooden dividers with complicated carvings of flowers in them. She's a little relieved that she doesn't have to worry about being looked at now. Reborn doffs his hat, and she wrinkles her nose at the smooth, tidily brushed arc of his hair. The little dragon is sitting on top of it, robbed of its hellnest.

They're given their menus, and are told that their server will soon come to take their drink orders. Kou takes her menu and practically hides behind the laminated pages.

They serve their soft drinks in glasses, according to the picture, but Kou would feel bad going to a restaurant this fancy and getting a Bepsi. She skims down the page for something cool, and settles on iced tea. Satisfied, she starts flipping through the dinner menu. She skips the fish and ribs, and slows down when she gets to the pasta. It's not something she has often. Kou is used to eating out by herself, and she checks the price on instinct.

She pales.

Her eyes rake over the price tags, all of them clearing _far_ over the 2,000 yen Kou has come to expect from decent restaurants. "Reborn…!"

"Hm?"

"The pricing is a little…"

"I'm a high-ranking mafioso, you think I can't afford dining for two at a four-star restaurant?"

She makes a noise of discomfort and shrinks down to rest her chin on the table. She likes steak, but it's easily the priciest type of meat on the list. Reborn probably _is_ rich, but she doesn't want to be in debt to a criminal.

The waiter comes to take their drink orders. Kou orders her iced tea, and Reborn asks for a bottle of red wine. When the waiter leaves, Reborn places his briefcase in his lap and unlatches it.

"What are you…?"

"I told you I'd look into your school life, didn't I?" He takes out a piece of paper and hands it to her.

It's a science test. _Her_ science test. It's marked with Nezu's furiously circled and underlined '10' in bright, accusatory red. She had hid it in her desk with all of her other terrible test scores. But now it's been marked in thick golden pen with looping handwritten notes in a language Kou can't quite pick out. The '10' has been scratched out in black felt pen, and replaced with a flourishing gold '40'.

She stares. Her eyes trace back down to the questions. Several sections are scratched out with that same black pen. Several of her answers have sections circled in gold and marked correct. The gold comments are arcing over the scribbled-out comments.

Her eyes sting.

"I've only seen a few of these, but it seems to be reoccurring theme in your science class. There's a notable lack of focus on your other tests, but it's science where your tests are actively sabotaging you."

"That can't be…Nezu-sensei harassed Okumura, not me."

"You think he can't do both?"

Her eyes drink in the flourishes of coloured ink. Could he?

"Sometimes, the world is just as unfair as it looks. Growing up is being able to distinguish that."

The waiter comes back with their drinks and takes their orders — beef stroganoff for her, and a gourmet burger with a side of potato wedges for Reborn. It's not an order that suits him, but she decides not to comment. Their menus are taken away, and Kou folds her hands tightly in her lap and sucks furiously at her iced tea. Reborn is distracted with something in his briefcase.

She doesn't know the time, and didn't bring a watch, so all she knows is that she's almost finished her entire cup and Reborn has put away the briefcase when Kou needs to pee. She squirms and looks around.

"Bathroom is through the door in the left-hand corner," Reborn says without looking up from his wine glass.

Kou stands and tries to leave their table as inconspicuously as possible. Again, no one pays her any mind. She still doesn't straighten her posture until she's past the door and away from any possible prying eyes.

The bathroom is clearly labeled, thankfully, and she pushes the door open to the lady's room. Her breath catches, even though she was kind of expecting the environment. The tiling is exquisite, and there are mirrored strips decorating the walls as the path winds into a warmly lit open room with eight Burgundy stalls and a huge set of mirrors that stretches all the way to the ceiling. She peers at the sinks. They're made with creamy porcelain. When she passes her hand under one of the gleaming taps, it spouts water automatically.

She's almost ashamed to pee here.

Almost, anyway. Kou dances into the stall just behind her and gets her business done. The toilet paper holder has a checkered pattern, to match the toilet lid. She feels like she's in an art exhibit.

Kou makes an effort to smooth her dress and check herself over before leaving the stall, just in case someone drops in to catch her looking dumb. Nothing seems out of place, so she carefully steps out into the extravagant bathroom to see her reflection revealing itself along with her.

Kou approaches the mirror, looking herself over. The dress doesn't hang off her, like it did when she first tried it on. It almost seems to float over her body, especially around the arms. The ends of the sleeves blossom out around her wrists, making them look delicate. Her hair pulled too tightly to her skull to go wild, and it blooms out from her sequined scrunchy. Reborn had pasted her face over with foundation, but there's not much colour to it, just a slightly pink glaze of lipgloss and a little more warmth to her cheeks.

Does she look okay? She can't tell. All she can see is herself. Her eyes are automatically picking out _her_. Does she look stupid with all this extra stuff tossed on top? Her fingers, covered in callouses and thin scabbed-over scratches, twist together in her reflection. She looks down at them, and puts them under the water as an excuse to not look up again.

She holds her hands up when they're adequately scrubbed and looks for a paper towel dispenser. Her face pulls when she sees it next to the air-dryer. The thing dispenses padded paper towels she'd use to clean up grease spills. Who _pays_ for this?

The door of one of the stalls creaks as she dries her hands, and her spine goes straight in anticipation of being judged. She'd normally be able to stomach it, but her skin is thinner than usual today, and she's not sure how much she can withstand. A _bathroom_ is making her feel pathetic.

Kou turns to the newcomer and opens her mouth to make some sort of pithy comment, but it snaps closed with a little 'click' when she sees who steps out.

"Hi," says Okumura Kenta.

Kou stumbles backwards and trips over her own feet in attempt to get away. Okumura doesn't move.

"W-What are you—"

"I don't have any reason to go after you," he says quietly. "I'm settled with Reborn."

Kou looks desperately to the door. Has Reborn already—?

"I'm…I've _settled things_. With Reborn." Okumura takes a step forward, and Kou flinches. He pauses, and leans back. "He found me…somehow. Already."

"He found you?"

"He— I…" Okumura hunches his shoulders and squeezes his eyes shut, like all of his words are coming out with brambles that cut his throat, and he needs to brace himself for the pain. "…It's hard to get people into Namimori. You need connections. I'm…I work in sabotage contracts. All I do is move quickly and tear things down. But they— I was hired. To take you. So we could blackmail Sawada Iemitsu for his connections. Reborn found me out and then settled things."

"Oh." Kou slowly stands, hands still pressed against the wall.

"So, I wanted to say. Sorry. In private. Alone." He gives a sidelong gaze at the ceiling, then the floor. "I've never attacked someone before. I wasn't sure what to do. I only know how to use the cords in combat in theory. I've never done it before. You could have gotten hurt."

"Uh…it's…I guess it's fine?"

"It's not. But okay."

"Why are you…" She looks around nervously. "Why are you, erm, confronting me in a women's bathroom?"

His cheeks pinken. "…Reborn asked me to."

" _Why?"_

"As a distraction. I guess."

Kou hesitates to actually digest that.

Then she sprints out the door.

Okumura doesn't hold her up. He probably already knows what she's going to see. But she hopes she won't find it anyway.

Kou isn't so lucky, unfortunately, and she skids to a stop in front of her table to find Reborn, his hat, and his stupid briefcase missing in action.

She leans against the table with both hands and lets out a furious, tortured groan. Of course. Of course! Why would Reborn bother being _nice_ to her. He needed her and her mom out of the house to do…what is he even doing?

She turns to Okumura when he appears at her side. "What is he even doing?"

"He uh. Settled with me. So…" Okumura tilts his head slightly, eternally furrowed brows wrinkling a little. Up close, Kou realizes they're just shaped that way. "…He…he said he'd get rid of the problem."

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

Reborn appears at the apartment well within his self-imposed time limit. It's an old place, still well-kept, but probably built in the 80s, maybe a little earlier. It's in a nice, equally old neighbourhood, peaceful and secluded, where any loud noise would attract too much attention.

He uses the keys he was given to get inside both the building and Okumura's one-room apartment. The place is kept surgically clean, making the six-tatami room feel massive. The only furniture is a coffee table, and his bed is a futon stuffed in the closet, sitting on top of his small collection of clothes. The place didn't come with a fridge, so he's using a tiny mini-fridge instead. There's a radio on the little coffee-table, presumably his only source of stimulus in this hole. There are coils of steel cords in the cupboards instead of dishes, and he finds a bag of paper plates in one of the lower cupboards. The drawers are full of more disposable tools.

Reborn opens the fridge and pulls out a piece of paper taped to the back, hidden behind a stack of frozen dinners. It's a catalog of duties, but more importantly, it's a file with an address. He knows the street, and the best way to get there. Task done, he leaves Okumura's sad little apartment as he found it.

The location of Okumura's employers is an office in a little strip mall. Still an area where a gunshot would draw too much attention. Not that Reborn cares. He tries the handle, and when it doesn't open, picks the lock. The inside is furnished to the bare minimum, so someone could look into it without finding it strange that people would be doing business there. Which is to say, a receptionist's desk, a row of cushioned chairs, and a framed picture on the far wall.

Reborn walks confidently down the hallway to the right and tries the handle on the door at the very end, which looks conspicuously office-like with its fogged glass, as opposed to the flaking metal door to the left and the windowed door to the completely empty room on the right. It's locked. He kneels to pick this one too.

The sound of the metal door opening is obvious in the relative silence of the building, though the footsteps are almost inaudible. When he hears the person exhale with the effort of hoisting whatever weapon they have back to strike, he grabs them by the ankle and yanks their entire leg forward. They topple back. Reborn twists around on one leg to place his foot by the attacker's shoulders, punches him in the throat, and throws him against the wall so he falls on his face. Reborn whips a handkerchief and rubber strap from his pocket, stuffs the handkerchief in the man's mouth, holds it there with the strap, and keeps it taught with one hand while he break's the man's arm with his other. The handkerchief does a decent job of muffling the scream.

Reborn takes out a pair of handcuffs next, ties the rubber strap around the man's head, and cuffs his unbroken arm to his ankle. Then he goes back to picking the lock. When he finishes, he takes out his gun, opens the door, and shoots both of the armed men waiting for him in one fluid movement. His arm vibrates with the stress of recoil, but his aim is true.

He steps over the fallen body of the one between him and the nearest file cabinet. There's a bunch of chairs in here too, in a circle, surrounded by beer cans. His nose wrinkles slightly, and he focuses on his search. There's nothing in the cabinets. He's guessing they thought they were going to set up a business here. He goes over to the oak office desk sitting by the window, and tries the thin centre drawer. It opens to a carefully creased note with a coffee ring stain.

 _Young Lion family in Namimori Japan. Sawada._

 _Social housewife. Antisocial son._

He gives it a sniff, but only gets the odor of coffee. When he looks closely at the print, it seems like it was digitally typed and then printed, not a photocopy. Tells him less than nothing about the source.

More importantly is that they somehow know that Kou is anti-social, but not that Kou is a girl. The CEDEF is built on a model of information reduction — unless Kou became a missing persons or Iemitsu explicitly asks someone 'is my kid a boy or a girl', they're unlikely to change the faulty base information that they started out with. As for the other contracted individuals stationed to bottleneck the hostile parties entering Namimori, Reborn doubts they'd care about Kou's gender transition enough to make a note of it. Over half of them are retirees.

That means the leak was given out by someone who has access to the reports Iemitsu's been getting, but not the knowledge of the people actually in Namimori.

Another man cusses out the door. Reborn pulls out his gun and shoots him the second he walks into the room without looking up from the page.

That eliminates a huge portion of the potential sources. This is a strange way to get information, though. Probably anonymous.

"Who sent this?" Reborn asks the man he just shot.

"Who the hell are you?" The man groans back.

"Answer the question."

"The fuck is your…"

Reborn strides over to him, whips out another handkerchief, and stuffs it in his mouth. This one seems to understand what's going on faster than the other one did, but Reborn doesn't care much. He presses a gloved hand over his mouth with the paper still held between two fingers and uses his other hand wrap the man's jacket around his fist and punch him in the bullet wound.

 _Much_ more muffled. He needs bigger handkerchiefs.

"Torture doesn't work," Reborn admits, "but I don't have anything to bait you with, and I don't much want you alive."

The man's eyes are rings of bloodshot white.

"But desperation doesn't get me good information, so for now, I'm only going to punch you in the bullet wound when I think you're being a _bad boy._ " Reborn whips the handkerchief from his mouth and tilts his head condescendingly. "I'll give you my rolodex full of very important numbers if you tell me who sent you the information about the Sawada family. I will give you five cards if you tell me your best guess. I will give you a business card that is guaranteed to give you good work if you tell me you don't know."

The man has broken out into a sweat, from stress, shock, or fear, it's unclear. His eyes flick from Reborn's ready fist to his cool gaze, assessing the threat.

"I don't know," he says.

Reborn sits back, putting away his bullet-hole-punching fist. The handkerchief-holding hand is still at the ready.

"Theories?"

"I don't know. We got it anonymously. Fr-from what we hh-hh-heard, it's only B-Blackmarket who got the message."

"And it's just the printout?"

He nods.

"…Good enough." Reborn pulls out a card he had pre-prepared based on Okumura's descriptions and tucks it in the man's trouser pocket. He takes the man's cellphone out of his jacket pocket in exchange.

"W-What are you…?"

"Just being tidy about things. Don't worry, I shot you with a nonlethal piece, you shouldn't need a hospital. Maybe some disinfectant." The gun is designed to make wounds that look and feel like the entry wound of a lethal bullet, and they bruise hard enough to cause shock, which is always useful when you want to expedite negotiations.

Reborn dials the number from memory. The person on the other end answers by the second ring.

"Hello?"

"Four indisposed persons in need of relocation," says Reborn.

The man laughs. It sounds high and wheezy. "What'd they do?"

"First known group to target the Sawada family."

The statement sucks the humour from the man dry.

"Address."

He reels it off and snaps the phone shut. The man is looking panicked. Reborn neither knows nor cares if it's justified.

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

Okumura ends up eating the burger, which is probably why Reborn had ordered it to begin with. He eats like he's not sure he's even allowed, and it's only an awareness of Kou and the possibility of confrontation that keeps him from sprinting out the door.

Kou's beef stroganoff is really good, though. She should eat pasta more often.

"Why are you even a…a 'hitman'?" Kou asks him when he starts to give the wine a leery look.

"Oh…hm." Okumura swirls a potato wedge in the little porcelain dish of ketchup. "…I never…thought about it? Everyone in my foster home did that. It wasn't a big deal. I, uhm, I don't have the upper-body strength for a bow and arrow. The strain is. It kind of turns my arms to noodles. I'm no good with firing things, in general. But using weird techniques like coil-whips means I can be a mid-long-range specialist. I can, uhm, drop stage lights…and stuff like that."

"Not really many oppurtunities to do stuff like that trying to get at me, huh," Kou huffs.

He shakes his head. "I'm…weaker, and smaller than you. My upper body strength is better than yours, but you'd overpower me easily. Anyone would. And I guess I really didn't want to bother you. Kidnapping someone without hurting them is, uhm. Really, really hard. They got mad at me for trying. Reborn called me stupid."

"Well…Thank you for trying really really hard. I don't think it's stupid."

His mouth twitches into a small smile.

"…Uhm, so…I guess I should ask, since I'm the target. Reborn probably won't tell me, anyway. I don't think he takes me very seriously. Er…How did they contact you? Why were you even working for them?"

"I…I-I, well, I was forced to…" He rubs his finger along his potato wedge. "…I'm. Thirteen years old. As in I turned thirteen, recently. Most second-year middle school kids are? In Japan? Except in Namimori. Most of you are a year older. It makes me…people like bullying me for that, obviously, because I don't know as much as everyone else, I guess. It's easy for people to make me do things. I have to work harder for people to, well, respect that I can do things by myself, I guess. It doesn't help that I'm bad at…pretty much everything."

He puts the potato wedge in his mouth and chews with a grim expression. When he swallows, he seems a bit more confident.

"My foster parents left to Korea, and the mainland isn't as regulated as Japan is. I think they sold my location and status. The government doesn't know they're gone yet. Someone used that information to track me down. I don't know anything about kidnapping, and I wasn't sure what they needed you for, so I wasn't interested, but I'm thirteen. And they had guns."

"They threatened you."

"It's okay. It's normal." He pops another wedge into his mouth.

"It _shouldn_ _'t_ be." But Kou has been forcing people to stop bothering her by using social decorum as a shield long enough to understand that Okumura can't understand. He'd need someone far better at explaining things than she is who actually knows what it's like to have ideas this wrong to tell him so. She thinks Reborn and all of her extended family count as people who never had the chance to talk to this hypothetical person. Maybe her dad, too. He makes so much sense, when he talks to her, but he treats potential kidnapping like she's getting inflammatory hatemail every morning.

If this doesn't stop within the next two months, is she going to be just as twisted?

They finish eating in silence. The maître d' assures them their dinner has already been paid for, and they leave to a half-lit sky. Okumura looks around, and gives her an almost apologetic look. "I should take you home. There might be more people who know about you. I wouldn't know, but I mean. Probably."

"Oh, uh, sure. Not a problem."

The streets are emptier at this hour, and without the additional distraction of chewing out Reborn for forcing her to _do things_ , the walk seems to take forever. Okumura seems dead-set in not saying a word. She thinks of what Reborn said about Okumura, a specialized contractor that can't do his specialty decently. The way he describes himself and his helplessness.

"Have you never hurt anyone before?" She asks him, feeling a little hopeful about him now.

He glances towards her, then away. "I've hurt lots of people. It's just never been my job."

All of Kou's organs constrict at once. Her sphincter clenches so hard it practically recedes into her ribcage. "…Okay!"

They don't talk to each other for the rest of the way home.

The streets of the residential area are mostly clear, beyond the sound of people in their yards, until they get to Kou's house. And the person perched on the fence of her house. The person with blood-red hair. Perched on the fence. Of her house.

Kou's muscles all cramp up so tightly she feels like she's about to turn inside out.

"Oh, if it isn't Kou-chan," auntie Yuna waves. Her hair is shorn into a thin pixie cut, and she's wearing some tacky floral shirt, because of course she is.

Okumura tenses up beside her. Kou glances to him, then to her aunt. "What are you downtown for?"

"Him." She gestures to Okumura.

"Why are you—"

"It's okay," Okumura whispers to his feet. "He told me about this too."

"Told you _what?_ " Kou hisses.

"…He's getting rid of my employers. So I need a new one."

Yuna jumps down from the fence and approaches them with languid steps. "We always love new blood in the village."

"What do you mean by new blood? Hey, Okumura-kun, what's going on? What are they employing you for?"

"That's confidential, sweetheart. Why don't you go inside and see your mom, alright?" Yuna smiles sickly sweet.

Kou is torn three ways, between 'it's just never been my job', the inescapable threat of her extended family, and her own bleeding heart. Her bleeding heart colludes with her fear of her family to overthrow her common sense.

Kou steps between them. "What do you mean by new blood?"

"Kou," says Yuna, with a sudden glacial tone that makes Kou flinch, _"move."_

"Did you know people are trying to kidnap me?" Kou snaps back. "What if I hire Okumura-kun instead? You don't need to take him anywhere! I'm _endangered._ "

"Kou, _he_ tried kidnap you, and he's not strong enough to justify turning him around, right? Move."

"Why do you know about that? What has Reborn been doing?"

"I need to hire him because _I don_ _'t know_ what Reborn's doing. Mo—"

"He's _thirteen_ ," Kou wails, "why do you need a _thirteen-year-old_?"

Yuna takes two steps forward and places her hand on Kou's forehead.

Stars explode behind her eyes, and she's suddenly overstimulated to the point of insensibility. The fabric of her dress moving across her skin makes her nerve endings scream. Her knees buckle, and she drops to the pavement. The rough cement feels like the entire universe exploding against her cells. Heat ripples through her in a burning wave of brain-scrambling sensation.

She feels like she's been staring at the sky for hours when she comes back into herself.

She sits up.

They're gone.

Kou stays frozen in the street, hands resting in her lap. She looks up at the sky and the stars dotting it. The street is quieter now. No one is around. No one came out to see their fight. There's no one here. The moon is waxing and casting a smoky glow on the edges of the clouds.

She sits there for about ten minutes. When a car drives by, she climbs up onto the fence.

 _Careful. It_ _'s a dark world out there._

The warmth doesn't leave her, no matter how still she sits. It feels awful.

* * *

 **-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

* * *

The van pulls up later than Reborn would like.

"Sorry," says the driver, "I got held up."

A head of apple-red hair emerges from behind the door, followed by a dull, worn-down pair of brown eyes, monolid and razor-sharp, just like the rest of his family. The brilliant colour of his hair is natural, matching the eyebrows, lashes, and his sparse shadow of a beard. His neck and clavicles are exposed with his low-cut black shirt, exposing the lines of countless scars like he's proud of them.

Yamazaki Kunihiro peers down at Reborn like an interesting insect. There's a trembling mania to him that flickers just behind his gaze. From what Reborn has heard, Yamazaki started in on a manic episode when he was sixteen and then never left it for the proceeding eight years.

When you're good enough at what you do, you can fool just about anyone into thinking the depressive episodes don't exist.

"They're inside." Reborn gestures with his head.

"Much obliged, Mr. Hitman." The bodies are loaded up with a practiced utilitarian rhythm, and though his eyes constantly track Reborn, he doesn't make small talk at all. He looks like he wants something. He looks like he needs something.

"The source is still anonymous," says Reborn.

"Too bad. Thanks for finding them. Giving us… _presents_."

"Happy to oblige."

Yamazaki wraps his fingers around the handle of the car door, but uses it to lean back instead of opening it. His head lolls lazily, exposing serrated wounds at his throat. "It's weird, you know. That they'd send anyone here. Instead of asking us."

"There's a bit of bad blood involved." No one likes Iemitsu around here, and he doesn't like them right back.

"There's good blood involved too. The Moon Daughters are always going to be beloved. We protect our own."

Reborn, not for the first time, entertains the possibility that the Kouyou family is a cult. Iemitsu hadn't given him a straight answer on that.

"As do we. Kou's a good girl."

"Well, at least we agree on something." He rights himself, and rests his head against the van. His face is a shadowed mirror in the glass. "I feel so insulted, though. As if we can't watch our own kind without help?"

"Does she count as such?"

"Kou-chan loves us very much, Reborn. It's such a wonderful feeling. You'd like it." His eyes slide over Reborn's figure with a sharpness that could cut a man in two. "Maybe."

Reborn has no idea what he's implying with that, but he's sticking to 'cultists'. "Don't you have places to drive to?"

"I'm being _sociable,_ " Yamazaki drawls, but he still opens the door and gets in the vehicle. Reborn leaves before Yamazaki can harass him even more — the languid attitude and indirect prodding makes it hard to be sure, but he seems genuinely irritable at the moment.

It's well and truly dark out when Reborn returns to the Sawada residence. Kou is sitting on the pillar of her fence, staring at the brick of the wall opposite her. She's nudging the gate back and forth with her foot.

"Rough night?"

Kou freezes, and turns back to him. She looks miserable. "They took Okumura-kun."

"I know. I had to share. I don't get along with your family."

She squints at him. "Why would my family know enough about you to _not get along with you_?"

"Why are you asking, when you so clearly don't want the answer?" Reborn holds a hand out to her. After a moment of hesitation, she takes it, and hops down.

"…Is he…Is he going to be okay…?"

"Is there a reason to believe he won't be?"

Her fingers curl around his. "You're a criminal. And he's a criminal. And I think my family is full of criminals. Or are at least suspicious people."

"My running theory is cultists."

She ignores him. "Isn't that what criminals do? Eliminate problems? Uhm…'clean up' or something?"

"You need to stop watching gangster movies. He's in your class, brat, they have to transfer him out to another school to close up that access point. According to the boy himself, he was being forced, after all."

She looks up at him, suddenly buzzing with energy. "Are you sure?"

Reborn holds her hand up and twirls her so she's facing her house instead of him. "If it so plagues you, you can visit his house tomorrow. As friends do."

"We're not friends," she whines, trying to wriggle free, "I'm just worried about him!"

" _Make_ friends. Lots of them. Making friends is just about the most important aspect of staying alive in the underworld, and it's a skill your father has mastered enough to send someone like me to watch you two. Make friends that can support you in tight situations. Make friends who want to do your dirty work. Make friends that can uncover that your teacher is falsifying his educational history and committing tax fraud and is bullying students to deal with his depression and self-loathing." He dances her to the gate, and kicks her into the yard. "Make friends who are worried enough about you to know when you disappear."

She shoots a glare over her shoulder. "I can be worried about someone disappearing without being their friend! Do you realize how _scary_ those people are?"

"Kou," Reborn says slowly, "I was talking about _you_ , not him."

Her jaw fixes, and Reborn can see her flush even in the dark.

"You have zero disposition for using people. It's honestly amazing," Reborn drawls, strolling past.

"Not true! I manipulated Mochida! I just, I didn't follow through with it. Because I was attacked." She dusts off her dress and follows.

"Mochida? You mean your _friend_?"

"We're not friends." There's a touch of spite to her voice now, bitter and acidic in ways it wasn't this morning. "I hate him. And he hates me. It's very mutual."

"Mm."

Well, that won't be the case for long, if Reborn has anything to say about it.

Protecting two people in two locations at once is _very_ hard, after all.


End file.
